


More than a trickster (Eng)

by BeatrixVakarian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence - Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Confrontations, He is more than that, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Loki is not just a trickster, Loki too, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sibling Incest, Tears, Thor (Marvel) is Not Stupid, Thor is angry, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-07-12 19:38:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 42,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16001912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeatrixVakarian/pseuds/BeatrixVakarian
Summary: Loki and Thor have always been on two different paths. But when the Ragnarok was about to fall on Asgard, things changed. Many things changed."We are in the middle of an act. I'm sure you'll want to rest- ""We need to talk. Now".Thor cut off the attempt to twitch - the nostrils dilated by the unconcealed attempt to contain his disappointment. The two exchanged a meaningful look and it was Loki, intent on nervously fiddling with his hands, who gave away first.From the way his brother held Mjolnir, he would not have had any trouble using it if he had put his patience to the edge."Go ahead" ended with a granitic look, giving him his back.Thor wanted to argue about what seemed almost an order, but he preferred to keep quiet.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to rewrite the events of Ragnarok according to my personal taste, because, as long as I tried to accept this chapter, too many things I found out of place, starting from the treatment that both Loki and Thor had. With this, I do not want to say anything further, it is my personal opinion, only my version of what I wanted to see in that film. The background is that, it starts that way and ends up in the way we know. Many parts are equal, others are modified, others completely personal. In short, take this story as it is.
> 
>  
> 
> Be patient with me, I'm not native english and this is my first time in this language. ;)  
> Hope you like it!

He had to understand from the instant that the Bifrost had opened so late, that something had changed in Asgard: Heimdall had never disturbed his routine in such a way as not to properly perform his duties as Guardian.  
Heimdall was a clock, normally. It did not break the second, but the truth was not so far. And there were two cases: either Asgard was under attack, so the Bifrost had been deactivated, or ...

Or Heimdall was not there.

Thor's expression was confused because, apart from the unknown man before his eyes - and the mess of shreds of dragon, or wyvern - he did not remember exactly, on the floor - nothing seemed to presage an attack at the kingdom.

Soon, however, the answer materialized as a revelation - and he honestly did not know how to react: it was years in fact, it was a long time since Asgard did not see his Prince, but Thor remembered that, as long as he had remained in his kingdom and before embarking on his travels in the various realms for reasons that we know well, never a statue of that caliber had been commissioned.

When he had stopped to contemplate that insanely and ridiculously pompous, theatrical statue, he tried to stay calm, knowing full well that a surge of rage - real rage - was gurgling in his chest like lava on the bottom of a volcano.

Anger. But it was not only that, no: there was a rough background, a shuffling shadow, a bitter aftertaste like gall, rolling along with that stream and boiled in his veins.

Disappointment. Bitterness.

He took a long breath, trying to gain the clarity needed to get in that scenario, in his eyes compassionate and disrespectful - honestly, he didn’t know why he felt so humiliated in the deep.

"We need to talk ... Father".  
If the spell to take the form of Odin was not one of his spells, anyone would have sworn that the Allfather’s both eyes were out of their sockets when they saw Thor approach the post where, surrounded by the servants, the King was following the play.

 

It was a beautiful afternoon. Fresh, sunny. The people had gathered for the show, there was a festive mood even though it was not a formality.

It was, in fact. Although Thor did not return to Asgard for a long time, that day was not expected. Or simply, Loki, had decided to lower his guard and enjoy his role thinking his brother still engaged in his personal research.

He handed the glass of wine to a young girl, trying to set a tone. Thor knew, he understood - you could read it in his face, clear as the sun. However, even if he was caught unprepared, he tried to restore order, investigating how much the show his brother wanted to give to his subjects.

"Welcome home, Son!" He exclaimed, followed by the echo of the crowd, crowd until then had very little considered him. He approached lightly, going down the steps of the patio and flanking him, while the show resumed its course, despite the distraction of that event.

"We are in the middle of an act. I'm sure you'll want to rest- "  
"We need to talk. Now".  
Thor cut off the attempt to twitch - the nostrils dilated by the unconcealed attempt to contain his disappointment. The two exchanged a meaningful look and it was Loki, intent on nervously fiddling with his hands, who gave away first. 

From the way his brother held Mjolnir, he would not have had any trouble using it if he had put his patience to the edge.  
"Go ahead" ended with a granitic look, giving him his back.  
Thor wanted to argue about what seemed almost an order, but he preferred to keep quiet.

The first thing Loki did when he showed up in the throne room, was to dismiss the guards until further notice. The second was to close the wide door behind him, finally revealing his appearance in a sparkle of emerald light.

Thor was in his opposite side, Mjolnir leaning on the steps of the staircase leading to the throne and still had the skull of Surtur tied to his back. He had recently fought a notable battle, his robes still bearing the marks - or rather the remains - of the fight, as well as the floor.

"I had imagined that our meeting would happen in a different way," he began with an ironic smile on his face, yet a sense of agitation in his voice betrayed his intent.

"But ... here we are".

These were the only words Loki could pronounce, before Thor suddenly turned, went down the steps two by two and reached him in speed. And Loki had to admit it: his brother knew how to put fear in his opponent, and how well he knew it.  
It was not just a matter of physical prowess, no: Thor was imposing from head to toe, and his sky-colored eyes managed to darken in such a way that they looked like a storm whirl.

He found himself backing away instinctively, until he hit the back of the door and, at that moment, closed his eyes waiting for Thor's fury to fall on his face. He felt himself crush against the wood, his breath cut into his throat: he waited until those knuckles broke eventually on him - he would not resist, his arms lay helplessly at his sides - but all he felt was the warm and wet breath of his brother, a few inches from his face.

Thor held him by the shoulders. He gripped it tightly.  
"Listen to me ... I will repeat it only once," he began, his voice was a dull rumble and seemed to reach distant, although the extreme closeness between the two.  
"Where is Our Father".  
And it was not a question.

Loki recomposed his figure as much as the squeeze allowed, trying to free the drape of his royal dress - mention should be made for what looked like one of the usual tailoring masterpieces - from Thor's steel grip.

"And mind you, brother ..." continued the other "That the only reason why this is happening here is not to disturb the quiet of the people, certainly not for courtesy to you".

There was an absurd background rage in his eyes and it was clear that Thor was elaborating a lot of emotions and thoughts per minute that would soon trigger his nature. Loki narrowed his eyes for a moment, reflecting on the situation and could understand - he could and did not blame him at all - the reason for his reaction. Here, despite the irony, there’s a fund of truth in his previous words... Their meetings, from that time, were able to exacerbate the worst of both.

That reflection lasted the time to elaborate a way of discussing along what they represented there and not, again, what had happened on Midgard, before the takeover of New York. He then held his gaze, returning the courtesy of that extreme hardness - the contrite features in an expression of indignation and resentment.

"Take your hands off me and then" he underlined, further shortening the short distance between their faces "Only then, we'll talk".

"Don’t test my patience ..." Thor roared, pressing on his shoulders enough to leave bruises.

"And you don’t test mine!" was the brief exchange, before with a big effort he managed to place his hands on his brother's chest and push him back.  
The expression painted on Thor's face was indecipherable, while his eyes followed Loki’s figure overcome him and stop near the steps. He wanted to scream, he would pull down the whole throne room with his only voice, if only people hadn’t to find out that Asgard was, in fact, deprived of his King. And that the current Odin was Loki.  
It would have been panic.

"He is on Midgard" was the simple reply from Loki, who grabbed Gungnir with one hand and made a small gesture to make it resonate on the floor. Sound that echoed for a long moment.

"On Midgard? Why- I thought was in his Sleep…?"

Loki took a long breath: it would not be easy to explain all that situation and already his mind was set in motion to predict what to do shortly thereafter. However, he didn’t spare a smug smile when he remembered what happened years ago. What he could accomplish.

"I stripped him of his powers," he replied, opening his arms as if to emphasize that this was the only sensible thing to do "And I exiled him," he added, bringing his arms behind his back, enjoying the expression on the face of the brother, in rapid progression.

Thor would never been able to understand the reasons.

Yes, he had to admit it: at that moment he felt a glimpse of satisfaction. He had stood upright in the middle of that room, clutching the King's weapon in his hands. Behind him, all around him, Asgard. The hated home to which he not belonged anymore, but which - sadly - was all that remained to him, from the moment that he had ousted Odin.

The reason might seem absurd or obvious to an external eye, but Loki had been aware of his actions. He knew why he had done it, he knew why he had wanted to do it.

 

The calm of Thor did not last beyond those words, however, because, Mjolnir in hand - now - Loki found himself sprawled on that throne so hated, the hammer pressed on the chest and a threatening luminescence around his wrist. He couldn’t hide a moan and a grimace of pain, trying in every way not to be overwhelmed by his brother's silent anger.

"I had to wait for it," he hissed, icy as winter – a strange behavior for someone like Thor.  
"Thor-"  
"No, I'll talk now," he interrupted, pressing on Mjolnir. Another moan slipped from his lips.

"I had to wait for it. Silly, I have not tested the hypothesis ... "

He spent a very long moment of silence, broken only by their breaths. If only they could both feel each other feelings, they would have discovered that there was nothing, apart from so much, so much bitterness.

But, again, dialogue had never been their strong point. And even if Loki, deep in his heart, longed for Thor to stop for a minute and listen to what his brother had tried to tell him for years now, he understood him perfectly. He didn’t blame him. Even if that silent rage began to cause him some concern.

And Thor didn’t want to go any further. He didn’t want to ask, he didn’t want to know. It was all ... It was too much. He had not realized how much the knowledge of discover Loki alive – again - had impacted his feelings, how much the actual finding Loki in front of him, in that situation, had hurt him.

He did not understand, but he didn’t intend to understand. He could not accept any justification - he didn’t find anything plausible. Not now, who was fighting with all of himself against the urge to hit him ... And that feeling scared him. Because…

"Take me to Our Father. Now".  
Loki narrowed his eyes briefly, a deep pang through his temple at those words. But he did not dare to reply.  
"I can’t".  
"LOKI!" And this time Thor's was a real roar.  
"BY THE NORNS, THOR! I can’t leave Asgard unattended! I cannot just disappear” he replied vehemently and, incredibly, the answer seemed to satisfy his brother.

"We'll go tomorrow. I'll think something ... Now, if- "  
But he didn’t have the time to finish the sentence, Thor was already coming down the steps to head into his rooms.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some nights can be peaceful, while others can be dark. There are nights when you don't know if the price you pay is insomnia or nightmare.

As expected, neither of them was able to fall asleep immediatly that night. Or rather, Thor surrendered to the weariness of the battle late at night - the Skull safe in the underground trophy room - Loki, instead ...  
He had fought the temptation to go back to sleep in his rooms. He found himself silently cursing that thought, because it was the result of a feeling that, at that moment, was an obstacle. Instead he went to the royal rooms, informing the servants and guards not to bother him for the next two days. The Council would have thought about the rest.  
No one would ask questions and no one did. The advantage of being in that position was about not being forced to justify himself: it was King’s word. Indisputable.  
He would create then an illusion in bed, just to avoid arousing suspicion. Even the King sleep, after all. And the journey to Midgard it’s supposed to be brief.

He looked at the ceiling distractedly. As was to be expected, Thor had not taken it well. Perhaps he had taken it in the worst possible way. It had been a couple of years since he'd given him the permit about that travel - Thor had mentioned the vision he'd had in that cave, with that scientist, but Loki, obviously, he couldn’t tell him anything specific.  
So, of course, under the appearance of the Allfather, he had started to do some research on these notorious gems - not before he transferred the Aether on Nowhere, to the Collector.

But he… He couldn’t tell Thor about Thanos. Not yet. Not in Asgard.

He squinted for a moment: he could almost feel it, the energy of Tesseract, floors and floors below him. He could almost feel his pulse, his presence. And Loki, beyond everything, hadn’t left himself in a dream with rainbows, enjoying the plays, erecting statues in his memory and gorging on grapes and wine.  
No. He had studied it closely, had approached Tesseract with caution, such as the relic that was. And what he had discovered had shaken him.  
He had never had premonitory visions. Who dreamed was his brother. But from the moment he had investigated the behavior of the gem – yes, the behavior - and interacted with it in a different way than how he had used it when Thanos had sent him to Midgard, something had happened.  
Tesseract had given him a knowledge. Sometimes visual, sometimes emotional.

He trembled visibly, covered in silky sheets, at the re-emergence of those sensations and images. And it was anguish, again. It was pain, it was resignation.  
If an Infinite Gem could destroy any human, gifted individuals like him would allow access, but ... There was always a price to pay. As it had been previously. However, this time, he had promised himself not to be crushed.  
This time, protected by the walls of Asgard, he had not activated it. He had not given up his energetic trace for obvious reasons, but he had tried to absorb his personality gradually. Because those gems were so powerful that they could be considered entities and even for someone like him, educated in magic, culture, formulas and spells, they represented a leap in the dark.  
He had seen something, the first time. Something inexplicable, difficult to decipher, a surrogate of lights and violent images, indistinct voice. It took him a couple of days to recover from the tremendous headache that that contact had generated.  
But he didn’t give up. The second time didn’t go better but did not give up either. Later he managed to concentrate so much and he conquered a brief meaning to what, apparently, the gem wanted to communicate to him.

 

Tesseract had a stormy nature. If Mind Stone clung like pollen, the power in that blue glow was less subtle but much more direct: it was like being overwhelmed by the glow of a star, something dazzling, metallic, dry. But despite the intensity of that contact, it allowed room for maneuver to understand.  
The images told of a dark, closed place. The sensations were not pleasant and radiated from the center of his chest like icy spiers. He had heard a deep voice and had not spent much time figuring out who it belonged to.  
Thanos.  
And his blood frozen.  
When Thor had decided to bring him back to Asgard in chains, Loki breathed a sigh of relief, because it meant that between him and Thanos there would be Asgard. Subsequently, however, it had not gone as hoped. He expected such treatment from Odin, even if his words - in that same room just before - had marked deep scratches in his soul.  
Again. Loki had always believed that he could go beyond those harsh, merciless words, given his constant stress that Odin was not his father, that none of them had ever been his natural family. However, it was not like that. His heart was bleeding, slow, silent, but inexorable.

He was still a child. He had always sought the approval of that father who had rarely been affectionate towards him - to say never. And he didn’t know if the hatred he felt was actually towards him or towards himself. Or both.  
But Asgard would have treated a line between him and the Mad Titan. Provisionally. All the rest, then, occurred for several reasons, but he earned an advantage, because only Odin and Thor knew he was alive. Nobody else. Not Thanos.

Although the images were not clear, one thing was even less clear: in every reading, he warned himself that he had to do something.  
"I must do it". He didn’t know who those words were addressed to, but the sound of his own voice seemed convinced but resigned. The taste of those words, bitter.  
The only other significant detail was the look of his brother: in Thor's eyes, wrapped in a bright purple light, he had read nothing but despair. At each vision the observation point changed, but those eyes always found him and were always turned to him.

He put a hand to his face, rubbing his tired eyes: it would probably take years of trying to interpret that message correctly. Years he had not, no more. He had waited for Odin to return to Asgard and regain his throne, now he was the one to return to the Allfather and to surrender at him.  
Surely, Asgard would not have met him again, because he would never ever be imprisoned again.  
With these thoughts, he watched the sky dawn. A resigned sigh escaped him: he would get dressed, they would leave and it would all be over. Again.

 

The nightmares gave him no respite.  
He had dreamed about Ragnarok almost every night since he had first dreamed of it, so he had gone to defeat Surtur for this reason. But nightmares, nevertheless, had not ceased. 

That same night, however, he resounded the Ragnarok. But there was something else. He dreamed of being back on the Bifrost, Asgard destroyed in the background, lying on the edge and looking out of nowhere: he was holding Gungnir in his right hand and Loki ... Loki was there again, hanging over the open space. 

There was no Odin behind to hold him, but he only had the strength of the rainbow bridge under his chest. His brother clutched the end of the lance - the blood ran down his arm, the blade cut into his palm where he had secured his grip. 

In that nightmare, Loki repeated the exact same words he had said to his father, except for the change of interlocutor: now he was referring to him. But there wasn’t "No, Loki" pronounced in a low voice. There was only silence before Thor left his grip on Gungnir and Loki was devoured by the abyss. 

He awoke with a violent scream, wet in his own sweat - the light of dawn to illuminate his room. He awoke with his heart exploding in his chest, a restlessness capable of breaking it in half, the horror of that image and the chills in having accomplished that act. 

He tried in vain to catch his breath for few minutes, before being forced to get up and run to the bathroom and empty his stomach, already empty. That nightmare had a sense of reality that had shaken him deeply: those terrified green eyes, tears, silences. 

He had found himself from the spectator's point of view, without being able to prevent his self from condemning Loki. To condemn Loki ... Loki who shed tears of despair, terrified by an infinite number of things he could not understand, suspended in open space: he surely would not have expected his brother to condemn him to certain death. 

"Loki-" his voice broke. Lifting a tired and defeated look, as the beats of his heart slowed and the tremors that shook his body faded, he realized one thing: he would not mourn his brother's death another time.  
His mind was clouding and sinking into chaos, throwing an alarm: he couldn’t stand it.  
Not again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr: [https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/]()


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki finds himself facing Strange and the revelation that Odin refused to return to Asgard. Facing the Allfather's death, Thor does not react well.  
> Not even Loki, actually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the kudos ^_^  
> My tumblr: https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/

"A mirror dimension ... Interesting".

From the portal created on the pavement, he found himself in what was supposed to be a kind of sanctuary. It was not clear where he was - he had never seen that building in his life - but he clearly felt the flow of magic all around him.

Moreover, it was clear that he was observed even though nobody was around him for at least ten minutes. He found himself strolling through the deserted building, muffled sounds, full of dusty books, going up and down the stairs, going in and out of the various rooms, until he found himself at the top of a ramp that led to a great hall.

In the middle of that large room, a man, clearly skilled in the use of magic, floated in the air and watched him in silence - hands at his sides. Behind him, the pattern of what surrounded them was repeated in an exactly mirrored image on the three side.

Loki stopped at the crossroads of the steps, hands in his pockets and his eyes turned to the man who, slowly, had approached and landed gently at the base of the first step.

"To what do I owe this meeting?" He added, with a note of sarcasm that was audible. Stephen Strange knew well who the man before him was - he knew too well, even though he hadn’t had the honor to fight him years before.

"I am Dr. Stephen Strange, protector of this Sanctum Sanctorum. And you're not welcome in this city, "he began, clasping his hands behind his back. Strange's gaze was irremovable, fixed on the unwanted guest.

"Actually, you're not welcome on this planet," he added, with an eloquent gesture of his head - in his voice a distinct irony, as if he were talking about weather. What Loki didn’t fail to notice, as well as the very particular amulet that the sorcerer wore around his neck.  
He was not as familiar as form and nature, but he could feel a knowing strength coming from it.

He closed his eyes amused, taking a step forward, descending the first step with nonchalance.  
Strange did not warn him in words, but with gestures: he picked up his magic, assuming his classic position of attack.  
Loki smiled.

"I'm not here to create problems, believe me".  
"Ah, I doubt it" was Strange's bitter reply "You are quite famous, your fame precedes you".  
"If I wanted to create it, we would not be here talking." Loki gave him a grimace, taking another step.  
"And deprive me of this pleasant conversation?"  
"Mh. To be pleasant you should withdraw those little claws. Or I should get them out. Or maybe we could discuss it in front of a cup of tea, even if, second by second, "and his eyes took on an alarming light" I'm more and more inclined for a bit of exercise" he continued, freeing his seidr in a green glow that began to surround it like a circumscribed green fog.

At that moment, the bell rang.  
Strange tightened his jaw: it was Thor, he could clearly perceive it.

"It does not happen every day that both sons of Odin materialize on Earth" and with a wave of his hand, Thor was transported to the mirror dimension.  
He looked at both men with a confused look, then lingered on the architecture he had around. He frowned.

"Thor" greeted him Strange.  
"Whoever you are," he returned with a hesitant glance. He looked then at his brother, motionless "What's going on?"  
"Tell your colleague to calm down".  
"I'm not an Avenger" said Strange.  
"No and you are threatening my brother".

Strange looked at him from head to toe: it was as clear as the sun that they were not - or at least Thor - here to create regrettable hitches, but he did not digest the materialization of alien forms on his planet, without warning.

"I am Dr. Stephen Strange, protector of this Sanctum Sanctorum, of this city and this planet. I presume you are here for Odin ".  
At those words Loki rolled his eyes at the sky: the midgardians were a curious race in their infinite smallness.

"Exactly," Thor answered. At that point Strange released his position and his magic and so did Loki, after a few moments of hesitation and a glare of his brother.  
The reality around them underwent a sudden acceleration, colors mingled, things gradually lost their shape, so much that both were forced to close their eyes for the abrupt loss of orientation.

That Strange, Loki thought, was a person with interesting abilities and surely, he had guts: in other times and circumstances he would have acted in a very different way to that beautiful and good affront.

 

It came out that Strange had had contact with the Allfather and had managed himself to break the spell, but did not intend to return to Asgard. On the contrary, he had told the magician that he would remain on Midgard indefinitely.  
Obviously Strange had not dared to contradict him: he had assured himself of his intentions and had given his approval to those conditions.

Loki left the helm of that conversation to Thor, withdrawing into an absorbed silence, while the other two discussed things not worthy of interest to him. He had the feeling that the situation had escaped his hand, because he did not understand why Odin, once the seal on his powers was dissolved, had not gone to Asgard, claiming the usurped throne.

Loki had waited for that moment every day. He was not interested in the throne. Certainly, in his opinion and to a large part of the population, his work as regent was excellent and well beyond expectations - but gradually, that thought was strengthened in him.

He had lost interest in the throne from the moment he had banished Odin and many times wondered if, desiring to be like Thor, actually the throne represented the same thing. He had never been sure of it until the end and was gradually convinced of this.

All he was interested in, was getting his damned reasons against who, until recently, he knew as his father. He had to close the circle from the damn argument in the crypt, passing through the Bifrost, New York and the incarceration.

Needless to say, many of those things were not discussed. The Allfather did not admit arguments, less than that with the members of his family. Even less with a Jotun who had spent his life seeking his approval.

His expression hardened at that thought: the pain in Loki’s heart would never have found a limit, an end. There was no turning back from Jotunheim's affairs, from the reality of things. He had no escape.

 

Strange opened a portal to allow both to reach Norway: Odin was waiting for them at the edge of a verdant fjord.  
They crossed the portal, which closed behind them at the right moment the harsh air of that landscape stroked their faces roughly. If Thor was worried about his father's health - those eyes, confused, reflected the gray of the sky above, Loki was tormented by his behavior.

Odin looked tired and his words confirmed that appearance, throwing Thor into despair and utter disbelief. Loki found himself in front of an old man, with his back slightly bowed and that voice set that seemed to have softened. He found himself before an Odin who had nothing to do with what he remembered years ago.

Odin had arrived at the end of his days. But he seemed calm.

And Loki did not dare to say a word. Not even when, just before he dissolved himself in a flash of golden light, he revealed the existence of Hela, his first born banished, and appealed to both as his children. And his eyes became wet, but the voice died in his throat.

That sentence opened a pandora’s box in Loki's soul, which was undergoing what, later, would have remembered as the worst moral slap in his life. Yet another insult.  
If on the one hand those two words had melted his heart, on the other it was gripped by the reality of facts: convenient, for Odin, appeal to his forgiveness right at the end of his time, without even the courtesy to address him in his personal ache. Praise him for his magic, which anyone had always despised except for his mother, sitting on a rock in the nothingness of a planet that was not Asgard.  
"I love you, my children".

And Loki found himself there, in front of a tearful Thor, unable to move, to think, almost to breathe.  
His mind was drowning in a spiral of conflicting emotions, questions and deductions. Of guilt and satisfaction, of recriminations and resignation.  
When Thor gave into the pain, facing his brother as the sky darkened and the wind rose coldly around them, Loki found himself feeling a sense of guilt that never, never, would have thought to try.

Why all must end this way every time? Why every time, his every action involved directly or indirectly to a nefarious scenario? Why was his every intention to regain a shred of justice for himself, turned into something totally opposite to his will?

Something inside Loki broke again, in a subdued crunch that sounded almost like a moan.

And when Thor hit, he hit hard. In all senses.

The impact of the knuckles on his face, threw him to the ground, but what really brought him to the brink of crumbling like a crystal, were the incessant tears of his brother. His face was a grimace of anger and grief, but those eyes didn’t hide the feeling of despair and abandonment that Thor was feeling at that moment.

Loki decided to stay still and accept the blast of that rage on him. He decided to accept that he deserved it and that, perhaps, that reaction was the least terrible of all: in a certain sense, he found comfort in Thor's ardour, finding comfort in the predictability of that action.

And while Thor was on him, blocking him to the ground with his own weight, the second punch came and then a third and a fourth, all that was granted was a moan throttled by the impetus of the blows.  
He knew he could not escape that thing and he didn’t want it either: he preferred anger to contemptuous muteness, even to indifference. He preferred that Thor should get on him, rather than turn his back to him. He preferred to feel physical pain rather than contempt.

Thor only stopped when a stream of blood reached his face and then, only then, he realized what he was really doing and how much Loki seemed unwilling to react. His eyes widened - the flat shock manifested on his red face, which gradually paled by observing his brother's motionless body.

Loki was a mask of blood, his eyes fixed on an indistinct spot on the side of his vision, his lips parted and battered, as well as that deep cut on his cheekbone.  
His breath caught in his throat at that sight: beneath him, motionless, he looked so small. So weak. So gracile.

The first drops of rain began to fall when Thor remembered that never, even when they were small, even in the battles that had seen them against each other, had reduced his brother in that condition. And never had he wanted to.  
Panic attacked him, along with self-loathing. He put both hands on Loki's chest first, then leaned slowly and rest his forehead at the level of his heart.  


  
Although now the rain had become incessant, both felt nothing but hot tears on their faces.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, the confrontation between them. Or, at least, the beginning of that, because it is impossible to expect to face all that tide of things, facts, unresolved situations among them, in such a brief exchange of affection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really apologize in advance if something will not make sense, but I had a bit of difficulty in translating into English what I had written in my language, especially in some points, which sound bad to me, but I can not find a way to write them better ... Be patient ^^'''
> 
> My tumblr: https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/

Watching the horizon, Loki was sitting on the rock where Odin had been sitting just before: his hand, soaked with seidr, trying to contain the swelling and heal the wounds suffered by Thor's anger and despair.

The storm had yielded to a fine drizzle, while Thor had pushed himself to the edge of the cliff and had taken place right on the top, turning his back to his brother.  
It was now more than an hour that both of them had shut up in total silence and honestly, Loki had begun to wonder why his brother was still there with him and hadn’t returned to Asgard - consider the words of the Allfather, about the return of Hela.

Odin’s death had raised a boulder from his chest, to replace that weight with something extremely different, but equally heavy: never before had felt free, never before had felt like a prisoner.

He would never have thought of such an implication: yes, he had not calculated that macroscopic detail, judging it impossible. When he had returned to Asgard, he hadn’t been surprised to have been able to put Odin to the corner and even to seal his powers: his father - Norns, how much he hated to find himself to refer to him that way - he had entered and exited the Odin Sleep in recent years and, due the events between Thor's coronation and the Aether, he hadn’t been able to benefit of the physiological cycle as it should have been.

Odin was old. But not so old. He had found him weakened and, surely, the pain for the loss of his beloved Frigga had been the main cause.

_Certainly not the loss of his son_ , he thought, with a bitter smile, taken to seal the deep cut on the lip with painstaking patience.  
He was sure of that and, as Odin could have sworn and perjured, nothing would change Loki's mind. Because, no matter how hard he tried, he did not remember a single day when his father was proud of him.

The pain he felt from the fall from the Bifrost, Loki had shared it equally in several parts, each of which painful as Hel.  
Discovering belonging to a frightful race - against which every Asgardian had always fought and towards which not only Thor, but also himself, had shown disgust, repulsion. It was clear as the sun that the fact that Loki was a Jotun must remain a secret until it would be convenient, because otherwise it was not explained all that propaganda of hatred towards Jotunheim and its inhabitants, voluntarily inculcated in their education.

Or rather, for sure his father had been a great liar and a perfect hypocrite. And to image what Odin saw in him, whenever Loki tried to approach or simply interact with him, he was pervaded by a wave of nausea and shame, which went far beyond his rage.  
Because it was a personal, natural matter. Biological. Loki had always felt different from his brother or the other Asgardians: he had different skills, a different physique, different sensations and a strange love for the cold - something that didn’t exist on the warm and sunny Asgard.   
He always thought he was like this ... Strange. Because Loki was strange, Loki was the one who behaved differently, who preferred magic rather than sword, Loki was that tall, thin boy who accompanied Thor everywhere, as if he was his shadow.  
Instead, he was ... A monster, basically. An obscenity. Laufey's refused son, a waste left there to die on an icy rock, picked up by a man who had seen him as a political excuse for the next day, although he had exterminated those people until a second ago.

Not that the Jotun may not deserve an end like that for what they used to accomplish - Loki knew, in war things were different from reality and for every criminal there was always a punisher, and vice versa. Or at least that was what they had taught him. But over the century, Loki had understood that even the Asgardians were conquerors, just like those who fought.  
The Allfather’s pretext, then, of the enigmatic concept that both of them would have been destined to be Kings, Loki had understood it only when he had held that relic in his hands, revealing the impossible. And that pretext had ruined his childhood and adolescence, as well his relationship with his brother.  
Because as far as Loki loved Thor, there was always that woodworm in his brain, not finding the answer to the simplest question: if he was the second child, what different fate could have embraced?

 

He suppressed a groan in his teeth, thinking of those words again. Of all the pain, the physical one was nothing, it did not mean anything, on the contrary ... Maybe he could consider it like a blessing from heaven, because it was the only way he could feel a pain that wasn’t dull, pure and simple.  
But then, there was regret and shame. The words to his beloved mother - his last words, before she was killed without Loki could doing anything. The shame and regret for what happened after the fall of the Bifrost, the terror of Thanos, the impossibility of sharing it, the dead of New York, imprisonment.  
The anger towards Thor, anger that often managed to turn into bitterness, in remorse, but sometimes in revenge, in reason. That relationship for him so dependent - as for the other - studded with ups and downs, of increasingly greater misunderstandings, up to this point.  
The shame of having come at this, of being aware of loving a person, but always adding a "but" below. The shame not to share the blood, as a lifeblood: here, perhaps this was the point that had thrown him into the panic. Opening his eyes and find himself considering Thor a stranger and realize that Thor could never understand how Loki felt. Simply because he was not in that situation and never would have been.

The arbitrary negation of the reality of things had destroyed him, because in front of pure and simple realization, everything became a lie, a fiction. It had been all a fairytale. One thousand and five hundred years of lies to which consequences of a certain level followed, before and after.

 

Lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed that Thor had abandoned his position on the cliff and had sat next to him. It was only when he took his left hand in his, that Loki turned to look at him.  
Thor had not returned his gaze, letting him linger still toward the infinite horizon, but Loki could read shame. He struggled with the instinct to get his hands back, but he was tired, exasperated.  
He saw him take a couple of breaths, undecided probably on what to say.

"I’m deeply ashamed for what I did. What have I done to you?" Began his trembling voice, passing his thumb on the back of his brother's hand, soft, taking it in his lap.  
"Don’t ... Please, forgive me".  
Loki let himself in a resigned grimace. He understood that Thor's apologies were sincere now, but whenever something happened between them, he felt like a broken jar, gradually brought back to shape by gluing the splinters together.  
He remained silent, lowering his eyes to his feet and moistening his lips which, however, remained closed.  
Thor sighed loudly, his eyes tightening with resignation. He had committed an unforgivable act: he had never raised a finger on Loki intentionally to cause him pain, since they had appeared to adulthood. They had always argued like brothers, they had fought in training, but never had come to such a thing. He had never arrived to make such an unconscious gesture.  
Battles on the battlefield, one against the other, were different.

"I… Loki, I can’t understand your actions. I tried to understand the reason about your behavior, but I can’t" he added, shaking his hand vigorously.  
It was at that moment that Loki turned to look at him - a silent tear that furrowed his face. Norns, those desperate eyes were the most cruel thing Thor could experience, what he feared most, what disoriented him.  
"Why, then, don’t you stop supposing and start asking?" He asked, his voice like a faint whisper, shivering like a dry leaf in autumn.  
Thor frowned, his eyes more confused than before. What could he ask if, every time, Loki closed himself in a granite silence or, worse still, reacted as he had reacted in the battle of Bifrost, in New York, in prison?  
Yet, Loki wanted nothing more than a ray of sunlight, which would recover him and take him away from that bitter cold. But he knew it was not easy. Nothing had ever been easy between him and Thor.

"How much are you willing to give me, Loki, if every time I try to get close to you, you run away...?"  
It was as if they were talking from two different dimensions: the words of both seemed distorted, seemed pushed into a sort of white noise.  
Loki tightened his lips, squinting. In his heart the usual resignation began to make its way, yet from his point of view the thing was clear.  
He started to withdraw his hand, but at last he decided to interweave his fingers with his brother's. The gesture led Thor to pick up that hold and bring it to his lips, brushing the white knuckles with his lips - his eyes bright and intense.

"If I told you that I had not calculated this thing, would you believe me?" Was the Loki’s simple question, expressed in a whisper.  
"Would you believe me, unconditionally?"

Thor took a deep breath, resting his forehead on the back of his hand. His last years had held up on the realization that Loki's every action had wrecked his entire existence. And his every action to try to approach him had wounded scars in the soul - and in the skin - of his brother.

"I believe you, Loki," he said firmly, but added, "But I need a reason. I can understand your hate for our Father, but- "  
"No, Thor. You don’t understand," interrupted Loki, a vehement nod of his head in denial, loosening his grip and putting his hands in his lap.  
"Why should I not understand?" Was the answer, this time with vehemence fruit of exasperation. The situation seemed surreal, as if they were two magnets with equal charges: they could travel together, but never too close.  
"Because it's personal, Thor. Because it's his fault if everything- "

He put his hands to his face, hiding his tears. And the last thing he wanted to do at that moment was to be seen so vulnerable by his brother, but he could not help it.  
A sob shook his body, Thor got closer and put his hand behind his neck - that gesture he used to do when he tried in every way to communicate something important to him.

"Our Father made an unforgivable mistake, Loki. I understand this."  
"It's not just about what I discovered that night, Thor. It's about something more! It’s- " he tried to keep his voice steady, failing miserably. A surge of anger came up his throat.

"All my life turned out to be a damned lie! But all that was out of place, suddenly, had found a place, except to bring along the aftermaths of what Odin has hidden to me, to you, upsetting our lives! How much time has passed since the last time you and I shared something? When was the last time you sincerely felt affection for me, that you sought me, that you loved me unconditionally like when we were young? 

"When was the last time that my love for you was not clouded by that envy that, the Norne witnesses to me, I was always ashamed to feel because I knew it was something extremely wrong. That envy would have distorted a reality already in itself distorted by reasons that we could not understand, but of which I couldn’t help myself? When was - " and here his voice broke, also breaking Thor's heart " When was the last time you and I were happy? I…"

"Loki ..." Thor tightened his jaw, before closing his arms around that trembling body, taking care not to bump his wounds, in the urge to stop all that despair.

It was all terribly dark. Thor took his mind back in time, but like Loki, he was struggling to find something that was extremely perfect, happy, relaxed. Even the moment before his coronation - the day that was to mean the most important of his life - when the two had exchanged an honest and loving dialogue, presented a bittersweet taste.  
Maybe Thor had really been a bad big brother. Perhaps he still was. Perhaps he couldn’t do anything but hurt Loki indelibly.

 

"I just would to go back to when we played in the gardens with our Mother ..." was the feeble moan that lifted, from where Loki's face was resting on his shoulder.  
And at those words, Thor allowed himself to cry. He let himself go in a rough jerk, passing his hand gently on the back of his brother, who had girdled his waist, resting his trembling hands behind his back.

"I didn’t want her to die! I didn’t want him to die! I just wanted to take revenge for all the evil Father did to me, what he disrespectfully spoiled, trampled on. He took everything away from me!" And he shuddered in his embrace, convulsively clutching the fabric of his brother's sweatshirt.   
"I waited every day for his coming, every damn day! I would have liked to give him such a blow that, if it wasn’t destiny that would bring me respect, at least he would be afraid of what I have become! That it was clear that never, never! Never would I have bowed to his purposes, that I could never have accepted what he had reserved for me, without a shred of pity! "

They sobbed softly in each other's arms.  
Thor found himself speechless facing of all that despair. He always found himself incapacitated by the intensity of Loki's soul, the impetuousness of his repressed emotions.  
Too much pain for a single lie…


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sadly, Hela had come. Mjolnir is destroyed, Thor is without his power and Loki... Loki must take a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Than you! Thank you for the rain of Kudos! *w*
> 
> My tumbrl: https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/

Thor's hand went to untangle the raven tuft stuck to his brother's sweaty forehead. It took a while for Loki to calm down, to calm down both: now the silence between them was no longer tense, but left room for something else.

The backs of Thor's fingers stopped at the ugly cut that stood out on his brother's lip and made a long sigh. Loki looked up uncertainly at him.

"I am deeply ashamed of what I did to you, really," he whispered as Loki clutched his hand and lowered it, shaking his head.

"Physical pain is nothing, Thor ... Physical pain passes. And I know why you did it. This is nothing ... "Loki answered, a cold hiss in his voice. "Of course, you could spare it," he went on with a touch of irony "But I'm not going to start a war because you punched me... We need a truce, "he remarked, leaving his brother's hand." And that's why I'll leave Asgard after we've dealt with the question of ... the apparent sister Odin has forgotten to mention in the last fifteen hundred years. "

Thor's eyes widened, the expression surprised and confused, but his response followed in a whisper.

"You can’t leave Asgard".

"Why not? What remains to me? It's not my home, I don’t belong to Asgard, "he remarked, with an eloquent nod of his head. A laugh in teeth, barely stifled.

"Loki ... You may not be an Aesir, but you belong to Asgard!" Thor's tone now sounded peremptory, his mighty arms clenching so tightly that Loki let out a moan of surprise.

"But it's your kingdom, not mine".

Honestly, in that emotional triumph, Thor had not yet realized that the weight of the throne of Asgard would fall on his shoulders now, whether he wanted it or not. After the Aether business, he had refused the throne. Now…

"If I must take the place of our Father, I will need you, Loki. I need you to stay by my side, "Thor remarked, a flash of agitation in his eyes. Speaking about the throne, since everything had begun to be destroyed, was never easy, especially with Loki.

And Loki gave him a hard, direct look: "Do not you feel a little selfish? You need it, not me. I'm not your servant, Thor. "

"No, in fact, you are my brother! That time you told me you never wanted the throne, but just be my equal "explained his brother, tightly tightening his grip and returning the direct gaze of Loki.

"And you are. If you didn’t care for Asgard's interest, you would not have reigned in Odin's place all these years. You would have destabilized the power, leaving the kingdom to its destiny. You can’t leave. "

"Don’t confuse the sense of responsibility with love, brother".

As Loki shook his head silently, Thor sighed knowing that the disagreement really was in their nature. They were so different, so incompatible ... And yet, they did nothing but gravitate around each other.

 

"Do you really want me to watch you reign sitting on that throne, after all that has happened between us?"

Thor's blue eyes reflected in the green ones of Loki, a shiny veil in both. Loki knew very well how much his mind could be dangerous for him and for others, as he knew Thor's character as much. And it didn’t matter if they were shortly before consoling each other, in true contact after years, if not centuries.  
He smiled bitterly, as Thor's arms slid down his, his head bowed, his long blonde hair slipping to the side and the black braid entangled in several locks.

"You are my family ... You are all that is important to me, Loki ..." was his answer. And it was true. Only the two of them were left now.

Loki pursed his lips in a quiver. The reality was that, in his heart he did not know if this could be positive or negative. Sadly were they alone or finally were they alone?

He really wanted to argue, except thant, turning to look at his brother, a vortex black as night developed from nothing right behind him. A sinister wind rose up, as the vortex clung together and took the form of a space-time portal.

"Thor-" the name died in his throat.

Hela had come.

 

Only few times such a terror could have been appreciated in Loki's eyes, exhibited when Hela disintegrated Mjolnir. The weapon forged by the heart of a dying star ... Reduced in crumbs. With a disarming simplicity.

Thor barely breathed in disbelief. Hela was something far beyond his reach, currently, if not beyond the reach of both put together. And what shocked them most was the absurd resemblance to Loki.

Banned. Imprisoned. The eldest daughter of Odin and Frigga. Loki was beginning to vaguely understand the reason that had led to this decision, but the instant he saw that woman, instinctively he had a retching so intense that he had to fold himself in half.

It was like looking in the mirror, only with feminine features. He did not know whether to laugh or cry. Ah, Odin ... At the bottom of that heart, hard as stone, there was room for regret and shame, then.

 

Hela immediately made her nature clear. More than a god, he looked like a demon and was intent on everything to pass over their bodies, without too many compliments.

And to asses that woman's power completely outside the canon, Loki panicked. He did not think. He did not mentally listen to the words of the Allfather: he called the Bifrost immediately, dragging Thor by the arm before Hela engaged combat against his unarmed brother.

Thor only had time to turn around and see the serious mistake, before - unfortunately - all three were teleported to Asgard.

 

When Thor first appeared in the Bifrost chamber, he found himself face to face with Volstagg - who had activated the teleporter, - Hogun and Fandral, who greeted him with a look halfway between the question and the worried.

When Thor had gone to his rooms the day before, following his diatribe with Loki, he had decided to reveal that secret to his friends and companions, absolutely recommending not to run into a leak of news. However, not knowing what had happened to Heimdall, he had opted to leave them to guard, along with Skurge, as long as both of them had not returned with Odin.

They were about to ask the obvious question - Thor's face was disfigured by a grimace and he was pale as death - when even Loki appeared in the room, exhibiting a not very good look either.

"What the hell is going on?" Was Volstagg's question, quickly descending the steps of the pedestal where the sword was still driven to operate the mechanism.

"Get ready to fight, Asgard is under attack. Save our people "was Thor's quick words, recovering from the shock. Loki looked nervously at the light of the Bifrost becoming more intense.

"I will keep Hela busy".

"No Thor-"

"Loki!"

"This is madness! Alone you have no hopes! "He shouted back vehemently, waving in a gesture of exasperation. Thor looked at him seriously, breathing deeply with dilated nostrils, under the now alarmed gaze of the three.

And at that moment the Bifrost reached its maximum intensity, opening its doors to the Goddess of Death, who exhibited a satisfied smile for having succeeded in her primary purpose so easily.

"Then go, Loki. Find Sif, evacuate the building, the city if necessary. Gather the royal army and contact Heimdall. Surely he will have already seen with his own eyes the situation ".

"Go, we'll take care of it," Fandral echoed, drawing his foil - a reassuring nod of his head, followed by both Hogun and Volstagg.

Loki was aware of the gravity of the situation that even his stinging tongue had been dumbfounded: but what worried him most was the impression that Thor really thought he could stop Hela now that he was without his beloved hammer.

But without saying a word, Loki started running across the rainbow bridge towards the royal palace. One foot after another, step by step, the heart in his throat and he did not even know why.

Why? Why fight Hela? Why not run away? He stopped suddenly, on the edge of the Bifrost, turning to the observatorium where Heimdall used to make his watch. Had he intentionally made a mistake to invoke Bifrost? Did he do it to prevent Thor from being killed? - Because, and he was convinced, Thor really risked the bone of the neck to stand against her in that way and Hela did not seem so inclined to plea bargain.

Otherwise, why? He took a long breath, looking around. Why had he agreed to stand up to Asgard's defense rather than wash his hands? He had split from Thor, he had obeyed. He would have been far from him. But the choice to fight Hela in a desperate battle had been his brother's, not his, and his mind kept shouting loudly that it was madness over and over.  
He could escape now. It would have been simple for someone like him, who knew Asgard like his pockets, every corner, every secret passage. Every dimensional passage.  
Instead, the glitter of the surface of the Rainbow Bridge seemed to glue him to that place.

He made an imperceptible gesture of his hand and in a small flash of green light, one of his clones detached himself from his body. Both looked at each other, mirroring their expressions, before the real Loki turned his back and proceeded towards the royal palace, resuming his run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to express a humble personal opinion on this affair ... I can not conceive the reason why Loki called the Bifrost, when Odin specified just before he died, that Hela would be a problem in Asgard. These incongruities, still made by a mind like Loki, send me into a rage, about this film. Something like that, I find it unacceptable. Then, it's about my opinion and that's it, but... Srsly, Waititi, what have you done with both of them...?


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Thor and the Warriors Three try to make occupied Hela at the Bifrost, Loki takes the way to the royal palace and... The vault, where certain relics are preserved...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you so much for al the kudos! <3  
> My tumblr: https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/

"How much are you willing to lose, just to not let me pass?" 

Hela had just warmed up, giving a brief glimpse of his tremendous power: Fandral had been hit on the side by a sword thrown at the speed of an arrow and now, the four, were at a critical point. 

Thor's jaw clenched and he had brandished the Bifrost sword to fight - the only weapon available. If Heimdall had been there, things would have been easier. And when Thor had started fighting without Mjolnir, Volstagg had almost torn his beard. 

"Thor, as much as I love to swing my axe , I think I need a little summary," echoed his friend, helping Fandral to get up. Hogun, silent, asked the same question with his eyes.  
Hela laughed amusedly. 

"This resistance is useless. Now that Odin is dead "he replied scornfully and opened his arms in a sense of belonging "Asgard is already mine. I will take back what is rightfully mine, with you alive or dead ... Little brother ". 

Hela's icy gaze, half-hidden by the unkempt black tuft on her face, upset the Warriors Three at least as much as her words. 

"Odin is dead?! Little brother?!" Fandral snapped, holding the wound with one hand. He was bleeding profusely, but he could fight. Maybe. 

Thor took a deep breath and nodded slightly. Odin was dead, ignoring this light detail with icy eyes and hair as black as night. He could imagine Hela's anger, but he now understood why Odin had come so far, to banish her and lock her up in a particular dimension, to contain her. 

"Hela is ..." swallowed, taking up position and wielding the two-handed sword "She’s the first-born daughter of Odin, banned by Asgard for life by the Allfather in person. And I begin to get an idea of the reason ... " 

"The usual family drama, in short," commented Volstagg, loading the axe and snatching a sneer at Thor. 

"We are a special family ... It may not end like this, Hela" Thor continued, in a lenient gesture of the head "You can still go back. And leave Asgard ".

Hela met his gaze with a shadow of disappointment painted on his face. His scornful smile had vanished, his features hardened and his hands began to run along the sides of his head, turning his long hair into a cluster of shiny horns.

Hela was black. Never a color was so guessed. She was the dark mantle of the icy wind of a winter night, lashed by the storm. She stood there in front of the four best warriors of Asgard and did not have the slightest hesitation. Thor did not know exactly how old she was, but he did not remember anything about her. He did not even remember anything about her in the books of Asgard's story.

Was it possible that her actions had been so terrible that she was completely erased from history? To censure her from the memory of the entire Asgard?

"What do you not understand, Thor" and she opened her arms again, from which she slowly conjured two black blades. Behind her was a ray of five of the same weapons.  
"It's that you do not have decision power in this thing. Since I set foot on Asgard - and believe me, I could not hope for better - I have unlimited power. I!" and roared so loudly that the whole room shook "I AM ASGARD. And Asgard is me. In her bricks, in her foundations, in her days and her nights," she went on, pulling out the blades and making them float in the air.

"I'll get to sit on that throne, passing on your bodies in the next ..." she pressed his lips, murmuring something "Ten minutes, I think. And here I tell you, Son of Odin: you are nothing, do not dare. You don’t know what the real power of Asgard is, let alone you are NOTHING! "

The clash of metals consecrated the beginning of what would have been the hardest battle ever fought by the God of Thunder.

 

"C’mon, Heimdall ..."

He mentally cursed as he climbed the stairs of the royal palace. He was trying to concentrate on communicating with the Guardian, but not knowing where he was - after they had not left in the best way - it was like finding a needle in a haystack. He could only hope that Heimdall was watching the various scenes, tickled by the feeling that he was looking for him.

On the other hand, he was sure that the Guardian already knew very well what was going on, yet it was easy that he was concentrating on Thor or bending over the city.  
But his race was soon arrested by the entire troop of the royal army, who welcomed him to the main gate. Loki raised his hands, arresting himself - the soldiers' eyes were halfway between bafflement and surprise. The weapons were raised against him, but no one dared take a step.

He could understand that he wasn’t the favourite royal family member, he could understand that all Asgard believed him dead, but even pointing weapons at his throat ...

Excessive.

He was about to try a way out without getting lost in chatter - because he didn’t have time - when a sound of footsteps resounded in the big hall, getting closer and closer. And a few moments later, a familiar face appeared from the soldiers' ranks.

"And I thought Thor was out of his mind ..."

Sif.

With her sword and shield unsheathed, she greeted Loki with a strange light in her eyes. And he himself was surprised to see her, as she still had to be on a mission. Probably she was back in the night. She had probably talked to Thor.

Loki hesitated an uncertain smile, a kind of very guilty greeting.

"Lower your weapons," he ordered. The guards obeyed "You owe me explanations. You owe it from here to eternity ".

"Sif" hastened to reach her, taking her by the wrist, and then tighten her by the shoulders - still had the breath short for the long run. The woman raised an eyebrow as a sign of surprise.

"Listen to me, and listen well: gather all the royal army and when I say all, I mean every guard," he explained, emphasizing each word with tone. "I'm trying to contact Heimdall too, we have to evacuate Asgard."

Sif paled in such a way that Loki, for a moment, had the fear that she would faint.

"Loki, what- Where's Thor ?!"

Loki moved towards the way that led to the underground part of the building and gestured to follow him, taking a long and noisy breath.

"Odin is dead. Thor is fighting at Bifrost, with Fandral, Hogun and Volstagg. There's no time "and he quickened his pace, extracting a key from his pocket.

Sif was like a statue of salt.

"The Allfather is ... Loki-"

"Take it, this is the key to the royal armory. Equip yourself at the best as you can. First, evacuate the building and then divert the forces into the city. The primary goal is the population, "Loki continued, handing the key to her palm, but Sif turned his wrist and squeezed his forearm.

"Loki ... Against who is fighting Thor?" Sif's voice was a warning. Hard, but her eyes revealed the first wave of fear. Loki pressed his lips into a grimace of despair.

"Hela. The Goddess of Death. Our elder sister ".

"If this is one of your usual lies-"

Loki mirrored her grip, pulling her to him. He stopped a few inches from her face, his eyes cold to meet hers.

"What are you doing? Do you betray me like last time? No, Sif, I don’t forget ... "he hissed menacingly, a whisper that left no room to interpretation. Sif widened her eyes and then lowered them, not holding the confrontation, while Loki relaxed his hold.

"Odin had banished Hela because of her behaviour: now she's back to retrive Asgard, and believe me, I'm the least of your problems now."

"And you left Thor to fight her?" Sif allowed himself with a contemptuous smile, in a rush of courage, snapping his grip with a jerk. The expression on her face was tense and angry at the same time.

Loki contracted his jaw. It was useless, no one could understand what the Prince of Asgard thought, how he reasoned. What really mattered to him.

"I'm here by Thor’s order!" He snapped, his nostrils dilated "Now do mine, Sif! Unless you want to have thousands of people on your conscience and it will take time to save them all! Time we don’t have! Time you're making me lose! "He continued, in a rush of rage as he had not felt for a long time.

"Hela is a threat that can’t be defeated. Not with the power we have now. The more we spend time here discussing, the more Thor is likely to be killed! You understand it?! I have to go back to him! "

"Ok! Ok ... "

Observing Loki's behaviour, Sif remembered that night when, upon returning from Jotunheim's bravado, all five reunited after Thor had been banned from Odin.  
_I love Thor more than any of you._  
Sif had grown up with Loki. And as far as Loki was the God of Mischief, she did not feel like doubting his words now, as she did at the time. She looked at the key, turning towards the armory.

"As you wish, my Prince" concluded, hastening her step.

 

And Loki breathed a sigh of relief, letting the tension accumulated in his body after that brief but intense exchange, flow into a long thrill. He had managed to put Sif in line and it was good: he knew he could trust her command skills with the army - which Thor knew too.

But now he needed to think. He mentally calculated the time to reach the hall of relics: too much. He had a couple of things in mind and surely two out of three would regret. But there were two weapons down there that could be useful.

He concentrated his seidr and his eyes became a bright light green, illuminated by his own magic: in front of him, as a pattern, he visualized all the various dimensional passages of the building. Asgard was swarming with magic and he was the magician who had learned how to recognize the peaks - those attractive and sinuous reality - and exploit them to teleport from one point to another quickly.

The knowledge and control of this magical pattern was an innate gift in him: Frigga had discovered it when, a few centuries ago, a small Loki had run from her, in tears, frightened and complaining about seeing strange lights. To have something in the eyes. And to his surprise, she had learned that Loki was able to clearly see the flows of magic that flowed between those junction - indeed, growing up, he had to learn to control this ability as not to disturb his vision when the concentration became greater.  
And it didn’t happen only in Asgard. However, by its nature, in that realm the peaks constituted a gigantic and luminous road map. Moving around the building was terribly easy for him - he had improved the technique in that area for centuries, until he found the dimensional portals - one of which had allowed the escape of the Dark Elves story.

He spotted the nearest knot floating near the library and approached with measured steps, stroking that flow with his fingers and tuning his seidr. Subsequently, it was enough to mimic the thrust of opening a door and, in a flash of green and orange light, he found himself in the treasury.

The sight of those steps and that long hallway, were able to always inflict a feeling of nausea and discomfort - no matter how many times he had went down there again, since he had taken the place of Odin.

He descended the stairs with measured steps, passed the first relics and stopped in front of the Tesseract: the cube vibrated its light in a shameless way - it almost seemed to do it on purpose, to call him to itself. With a gesture of his hand he pulled the cube, making it disappear in his pocket dimension and hoping, eagerly, not to use it. But, Loki knew, he would present as many risks as many tactical advantages. And it would have been advisable to bring it along for any eventuality - and to prevent an Infinity Stone from possibly replenishing Hela's already oversized power.

Fixed the Tesseract safely, he took a step from what lay on the opposite side: a shiver ran through his back, not of fear, but of disgust. However, the awareness of its use had materialized immediately after the destruction of Mjolnir.

He closed his hands around the Casket of the Ancient Winters, almost as if he wished to hope naively that it was not activating, as if he wanted to hope that that story had been just an illusion, a nightmare. But, starting from the tips of his fingers, the blue resurfaced superb and the relic began to shine with life.

He withdrew his hands suddenly - Jotunheim's weapon sounded sharp on the pedestal. If Thor without Mjolnir could no longer rely on his power, to have a chance, maybe ...

 

Another thrill, this time of alarm. A bad feeling.

Thor. Loki secured the Casket too, to make contact with his clone, left at the Bifrost. And when the connection settled, what he saw made his breath die in his throat.

Thor was on his knees in front of Hela, a blade nailed him to the ground by his left shoulder and his face disfigured by a deep wound. Blood was everywhere in the Bifrost room and the Warriors Three lay motionless on either side of the circular chamber - their bodies torn apart.

Panic seized him, his heart almost came out of his chest. He did not even notice that he was crying, until he felt a tear drop his jaw and fall on the edge of the collar of his dress.  
It was an inconceivable situation, the speed which their sister managed to defeat them. He would not have done it in time. He had not done it in time.

Hela was there, before her brother, ready to give him the coup de grace: Thor looked at her with a dull gaze - the only visible eye ajar, looking at her from the bottom up, his lips whispering something indistinct.

 

"LOKI!"

And a voice, shook him from that state of extreme terror, as to take him from the darkest depths and bring him back to the surface, to breathe the air necessary to live.  
It was Heimdall's voice. The Guardian was doing his guard and had finally turned his gaze to him.

With a sharp gesture, he conjured Gungnir and imposed his touch three times, making it resonate threateningly in the room. A roar spread throughout the royal palace, shaking it in its foundations, before the two Destroyers came to life.

He used his seidr to free them from the task of watching over that room, thus making them free to ascend. Free to take care of Hela, when it was appropriate and then, concentrating his magic, in a huge effort, he used the magic knot of that room to exchange with his clone on the Rainbow Bridge.

He ran. Speed would have been vital to cover the handful of meters that separated him from his brother. His eyes saw Hela lowering the sword straight to Thor's throat, they saw the flow of magical knots concentrate at certain points, he saw the Bifrost a few steps away from him.

He leapt forward, opposing Gungnir's magic to Hela, unbalancing her just as the blade of the sword was now inches from Thor's neck. He pulled the other blade from his brother's shoulder - an inhuman scream from both of them - and while Hela stood up, furious, he stood between her and the God of Thunder.

"Get up, Thor, we have to leave," he said, trying to hoist his weight, but only with partial success. Thor looked up a little so their eyes met and Loki, in horror, realized that that demon had deprived him of an eye.

"Stand up! We have to go!"

"N-We can’t... My power-"

Hela screamed the worst insults, as if that back wound, that interruption, had slain her pride. And she was preparing to attack.

Loki noted the situation, desperate, sending a desperate cry in turn.

"COME ON, THOR!" And yanked, sliding down the pair of steps that gave access to the Bifrost. Hela followed them briskly - the black blades floating around her, ravenous, nearing the final blow.

Thor's left hand tightened around his brother's neck, half caress, while Loki tried to put him back on his feet and back down the bridge barrier.

"N-I can’t stop her ... Run, get safe" Thor whispered, resting his forehead on his chest, before losing his clarity. At that point Loki found himself unbalanced backwards and struggled with all of himself to maintain balance.

But Hela's hand gave the order.

With the bust now beyond the barricade and the weight of Thor that contributed to the imbalance, Loki clashed again, with the knowledge that it would fall into the void. Like that time.

One of the swords struck him with a smear on his right shoulder, taking away his last grip. He felt himself falling, a very long moment where everything slowed down, where everything was wrapped in silence and only the mad beat of his heart broke that glass bell that cut him off from reality.

Then, he felt Thor's arms tighten around his body and a long shudder. Thor’s hands positioned to place one behind his head, the other at the small of his back, as if to protect him from falling.

Loki experienced total exasperation. He felt despair. He felt regret. He pushed his cheek to his brother's forehead, pressing hard and tightening his nape to his chest - his teeth clenched, tears running down his cheeks.

The Princes of Asgard would have died like this.

Or maybe ...

Loki turned his gaze beneath them and didn’t find the cosmic emptiness, but the edge of the Asgard sea, with its endless waterfalls. And, beyond the waves, beneath the surface of the water that flowed inexorably toward nowhere, an orange, vibrant light, surrounded by several threads of the same color - one of which communicated with the Bifrost.  
By the time their bodies burst into the water, Loki concentrated all his remaining seidr to get the momentum to go deep and fight the merciless current, in a brilliant green explosion that culminated with the opening of the dimensional knot at the base of the seabed.

Loki felt sucked by a huge force, now aware of being at his limit. With his last energy, he hugged Thor tightly.

Then, the darkness.


	7. Seven

Loki realized he was under the water when his body, clinging to Thor's, stopped spinning: in a dark and blue background, he opened his eyes and started to follow the light towards the surface, dragging his brother with him. The hunger for air was terrible - he did not know how long it was underneath, but judging from what he could feel his body, he probably had reached his limit.  


He emerged with a liberating scream, clinging to what appeared to be a rock, and then hoist Thor out of it. He looked around with short breath and found himself floating at the foot of a mountain waterfall - the place unknown to his eyes.  


With one hand he worried about his brother's condition, remaining half submerged in the water: Thor was battered, but he had begun to breathe again. He wasted no time and began to swim for both, to reach the shore and collapse with his brother. Only then, a terrible tremble on his arm, where Hela had struck him before falling from the Bifrost, pointed out to him the peculiar horror of his hands.  


They were blue. As well as his whole body.  


He had assumed his original form and did not understand why: he knelt with difficulty, dragging himself on the edge of the riverside, and then looking at himself in the water: seeing his red eyes and horns in sight, his breath died in his throat.  


He tried to summon his power to restore his Aesir appearance, but the effort gave no result. He tried again a second, a third time, but the more he tried to recall his seidr, the more he felt the strength abandon him, the more the shoulder wound throbbed and a black-violet border intensified around the lesion.  
His vision clouded.  


"Thor-" tried to call his brother, shaking him weakly with his hand, but the thought that he could see him in that state, made him withdraw his hand suddenly - a terrible knot in his throat, a sense of panic in his bones.  


He had to leave. In an attempt to get back on his feet, he fell exhausted - the pain at his shoulder was driving him mad: with that agonizing pain, he lost his senses again.

Thor could not move. Kneeling on the ground, Hela's blade pierced him at shoulder level, unbalancing him backwards, blocking him bent badly on his own legs. The field of vision on his right completely obscured.  


Unfortunately, that detail did not spare him that gruesome view: Hela, like a cruel predator who enjoys playing sadly with his prey, in front of him, her left hand squeezed on Fandral's blonde strands - his head in a position totally vulnerable to the enemy.  


Hela's physical strength was terrifying: Thor wriggled like an animal caught in a trap, to free himself from what was blocking his body, regardless of pain, while Hela sneered silently, evoking a dagger black as the night. The blade crept on his palm and leaned on the soft skin of his friend's throat. Fandral’s eyes were half lidded, aware of how it would end.  


"Run ..." he whispered.  


Thor tried to summon the lightning. He craved it with all his being, but he did not find it - just a shudder all over his body, pitiful. He could not believe it, he could not believe it.  


In a desperate gesture, he managed to unhinge the blade from the floor, freeing himself from the grip, but only to be nailed to the ground by Hela immediately, with a fluid gesture of her hand.  


And always with that hand, a moment after having exchanged a sadistic look with his brother, she cut Fandral's throat like it was butter. In the red of his blood, time stopped: at that moment, when even the last of his friends - friends with whom he had shared his life since he had memory - Thor was annihilated, broken. A broken toy in the Hela’s hands, ready to be thrown away.  


"What did I tell you? You are not worthy of Asgard ".

**************************************************************************************************************************************************

Thor awoke brutally in those images, feeling a tremendous frost in his bones - tears running down his cheek. The sky above him was gray and something extremely cold kept falling on his face.  


Snow.  


He lay supine almost completely covered in snow. With a long shudder, he tried to shake off that icy grip by sitting up, but he could not. He was terribly dazed and had no idea where he was: a groan came stifled by his lips, while his last memory was Loki who was trying to drag him away from Hela.  


In a moment, all the memories came back mercilessly. He clenched his teeth in the cold and pain, turning on his back and the instant he rolled, unobtrusively, on his right side, his eye fell on the snow-covered heap not far from him.  


Thor did not immediately recognize his brother, he could not: Loki lay on the ground with his face half covered by snow.  


Blue, in its Jotun form. Had it not been for the edge of his sleeve and some other detail of the suit, not yet covered by snow, Thor would have believed he had returned many years ago, when he went to Jotunheim and that body belonged to one of the fallen enemies under his blows.  


He stopped in his movements, his gaze fixed on the features so familiar, but at the same time unknown: it was the first time that Thor saw him in that form, the first time that Loki was shown in his eyes without the magic of Odin to mold his appearance.  


His heart was pounding in his chest and he felt a sense of restlessness, almost of fear, to imagining Loki regain his senses and cross his gaze: he could not lie to himself, that was not a vision that put him at ease. And he well knew the reason - a legacy long centuries, a particular education on the matter. But what lay in the snow, with the skin of a pale blue and curious, precise lines to mark it here and there, was the person with whom he had shared fifteen hundred years of life.  


Several moments of profound agitation passed. Of insecurity ... He did not know what to do. He put his hands to his face, rubbing his eye and gently touching the wound to distract himself.  


That blue ... He did not believe that a color could really shake him so much. He felt hypocritical, he felt like he never wanted to feel towards his brother. And yet ... And yet his stomach twisted, his mouth dried. His eye could not look away.  


"Loki ..."  


He called him a couple of times without an answer or movement - his breathing was regular, even if barely perceptible.  


He took a long moment, bringing his eyes to the sky: the wind whipped his body like a myriad of needles. It was really cold for his canons - Asgardians were not used to the rigidity of a climate like that. He had to look for a shelter and he had to take Loki away from there.  


With hesitation, once he got on his knees, he approached, holding out a hand to touch him, but he remembered well what had been said in the battle of Jotunheim.  
Do not be touched. He remembered those words and also remembered the wound on Volstagg's arm. He did not know if the Jotun activated that tremendously power on purpose or was just the natural reaction from contact to trigger the mechanism, but decided not to risk.  


He took his brother by his side and turned him on his back, dusting off the snow from his body, but when he levered behind his back to lift it, his eye fell on the terrible wound that stood on his shoulder: fringed with black, with swollen and emaciated edges, it looked troubling. It was certainly the Hela’s fault.  


Instinctively, he examined his wound, noting its different appearance. He frowned, confused, and only now realized he was not feeling any physical pain - perhaps the snow had softened his sensitivity. It could be that. But surely his condition, although deprived of an eye and wounded from side to side, seemed better than those of Loki.  
Carefully, he first hauled his brother's body in his arms, then hoisted him on his shoulder, cursing his height. He would have struggled to move like that - Loki after all was shorter than him, but his size was that and it was not exactly a feather.  


Securing his weight so that he remained balanced on his healthy shoulder, he took two steps towards the snow-covered forest in front of him: where to go? He had no idea where he was and never as in that moment he wished his brother awake.  


He decided to head downstream.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************

Could not say that snow was his natural element: although downhill, every step taken was a drag without a goal, with the snow that was gradually increasing, covering every point of reference. Had he been in his full power, he might have succeeded in influencing the climate, but now ... That thought obsessed him and he still could not understand how Hela had managed to crumble, literally, Mjolnir. He had tried to evoke his power again, on the way, but in addition to the slightest physical manifestation, the lightning seemed to be a memory.  


He tried not to postpone the thought to Asgard. He would come back sooner or later and drag Hela away somehow, but right now his mind had to be used to seek shelter in that desolate white wasteland. One thing at a time, so Thor had always acted.  


He found a cavern accessible several hours later: the snow did not stop falling, the wind did not want to calm down. It was a real storm that had been going on for hours now.  


Both were wet to the bone and Loki's dress dripped water as if it had been immersed in a basin, resulting tremendously heavy. With relief, he freed himself of the weight from his shoulders, laying him down on the ground in the small opening towards the passage that went into the cave: the temperature was not the maximum pleasure, but at least the wind had ceased, except for a slight current of air.  


The night was coming down and the total darkness would have been near: he summoned his power to light the cavern, to find, with surprise, a little camp a little further. At least that place was inhabited, he told himself.  


He found a pair of old leather and a few chunks of wood, dry enough to use. It would not have been difficult to light a fire, and although Thor did not know the Jotun physiology at all, logic suggested to take off his soaked clothes.  


And so he did, freeing himself partly from his own, spreading everything at the heat of the fire, setting both on the old leather. And that fire turned out to be the most corroborating thing in the world.

**************************************************************************************************************************************************

He had sat next to Loki, his back bare against the rock: the flickering light seemed almost mesmerizing, rocking him in what would soon be more than deserved sleep.  
His brother was still unconscious, but his breathing had become less faint, even though Thor was seriously beginning to worry about his condition. His gaze stopped on the wound, lingering - which did not seem to have worsened from the previous hours - and then passed on those strange circular signs at the apex of his forehead, interrupted by a lock of hair that, still wet, had remained stuck.  


The temptation of a contact was enormous. Since they were small, Thor had always had the inclination to touch, tighten, caress Loki. The physical contact, for him, was a terribly natural thing, often addressed to a good part of his friends and companions, but with Loki it always been carried out with more intensity.  
With him it was different.  


Now, the thought of not being able to touch ... It seemed to him something so unnatural and wrong.

He stretched out his hand, delicately passing his forefinger under the lock of curls that remained glued, to arrange it with the rest, then lingered for several minutes in the softness of that touch. But it was not enough.  


He looked back at those particular signs and was surprised to remember those moments on Jotunheim again: he did not remember seeing those marks on the other warriors. Perhaps on Laufey, in his grandeur, but it was not so sure and his memory could deceive him.  


His hand followed his gaze, hesitating for a few moments, then resting the fingertip of the middle finger on those exotic designs, gently touching the skin - the senses alert for any strange or painful sensation occurred in the immediacy of contact.  


When no adverse reaction occurred, he realized that he was holding his breath and, subsequently, stroked his forehead with his thumb, firmly submerging the rest of his hand in his hair. That gesture was a relief and was lost in the feeling that the touch was communicating: those signs were slightly raised from the rest and his skin was only slightly colder than normal.  


He let out a silent laugh, watching Loki sleep deeply, so relaxed, without his classic raised eyebrow, frowning. The sharp tongue. The he closed his eyes, leaning his head against the rock and sighing for a long moment.

He was now surprised to feel less uncomfortable, as his eye had grown accustomed to seeing him in that form: probably because Loki did not actually look like an Frost Giant - his body had such and such dimensions to that Aesir. It was simply blue, with a pair of small horns at the base of the hairline.  
But it was him, in all respects: in the cheekbones, in the eyebrows, in the thin lips. In the broad shoulders and in that lean and slender body, in the long and tapered fingers of the hands.  


And his mind goes back to his father, but without saving a motion of silent rage. What did Odin intend to do with Loki once he grew up? Why - why - grow them with that conviction, to be destined both to be King, if then the true nature of Loki had kept it hidden from the beginning?  


That Loki could have been the fulcrum of something political, it was now quite clear. But, if in the end Odin had renounced this, why to continue telling him that lie? Which had then generated a riot of problems, disasters. Ache.  


_I just wanted to be your equal._  


Thor had never thought about his behavior towards Loki when he was young and in Loki’s eyes he had never noticed any signs of unease about him - though, in hindsight, some of his behavior gained significance. But he understood now, with time and facts, that Loki had suffered an enormous inferiority complex.  


The problem was that he did not know if and what to feel responsible for. He certainly had hurt him. Certainly his father, with his severity, had been stained with several failures, but ... Certainly, when Odin had imprisoned him and when Frigga was a victim of the Dark Elves, he should have been with him.  
But then the story continued unabated, until ...

Thor reached out and clenched his fingers around his brother's wrist, picking it up on his lap and intertwining his fingers with his own. He did not know if they would ever find peace, because so many, too many things had degenerated between them and around them. But, this time, he would stop and listen to Loki - stop supposing and asking, as he had told him that morning in Norway.  


Loki had saved his life. Again. He was the least, he owed it to him, but he owed it to himself too, because even though he had denied the facts - facts he did not see - and for all he was convinced he was right, Loki could not always play with him. Lie to him.  


And in his eyes, there on the fjord, he had not seen the lie - or at least, he was convinced of this and he really wanted to trust him. He had to trust. This time he had to break through that armor, even though he feared the moment when Loki would regain his senses.  


He did not have to let him escape, not this time.

He stroked the back of his hand with his thumb, a long sigh. Then he closed his eyes.


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ... And Loki wakes up.

"Vanaheim, uh?"

That black-eyed child had timidly nodded, sitting next to his new classmate, slightly older than him. He would have known his trainer that day and it made him quite nervous.

"Hi, I'm Thor" he reached out. Hogun returned with a little indecision.

"Are you really the Prince of Asgard?" He asked softly. Thor raised an eyebrow, resting his chin on the doses of his hand - his deep blue gaze made the boy uncomfortable, who promptly bowed his head in apology.

"Of course I am! Why?!"

"I-" the little man turned his hands over his lap, undecided about what to say "I did not believe that the Princes could train with people like us ... In Vanaheim things work differently ..."

Thor inclined his head. Hogun replied the gesture.

"Why should not I?" he replied "And you are not a normal person! Like Fandral, Volstagg and Sif, you will receive a very, very special training! You'll see, we'll have a lot of fun!" he added, slapping a loud slap on his back - which almost made Hogun spit his lungs, who, with a wide-eyed look, observed the Prince of Asgard telling how they would become, what they would do, the adventures, fights.

"Come on, come with me! I'll let you know the others ... Hey! "  
Thor had taken his new friend by the sleeve of his shirt, but the child had bowed his head back. And he was still.  
"... Hugun?"  
"And share that destiny?" The boy whispered, raising his pale face to him - his gaze shining with tears of fear. Thor remained petrified at the sight of the blood stream coming down from one of the two corners of his mouth.

"Hogun-"

"Will we die like this? Will we really die like that?! "and took him by the shoulders, shaking him vehemently. Thor tried to say something, but the words died in his throat, terrified and white as a rag at that sight. He felt his legs numb, his arms did not move. The red of the blood, dense and slow, slipped along the chin of the other, crawling on his neck and falling on the fabric of the light shirt, was something hypnotic.

And as the blood flowed and gathered in a pool that was gradually soaking the shirt, his face writhed in those grimaces of pain that he could never forget, exacerbated by the typical pallor of those who would soon cease to fight.

He opened his mouth, but no syllable came out. The young man's face seemed almost transparent, in contrast to what indelibly stained him. The black and thin eyes, now wide-open, looked the same color, if observed in the sunlight. And they had something ominous, monstrous - as well as the sound and meaning of the next words.

"I was hoping for a different future" he added bitterly, lowering his gaze with resignation. And tears flowed from his eyes.  
"Honestly, Thor, I would have preferred to stay on Vanaheim ... Down there maybe I would not have had a busy life, but ... I would have had a life. What do you say…?"

 

It was his own scream to wake him up. And that tremendous feeling of suffocation, followed by the emptiness under his feet - the plunging into the most absolute darkness, with Hogun’s young face gradually becoming farther and farther away, to the point of disappearing.

He sat up quickly, rubbing his face, finding it wet with tears. He was struck by the tremor of sobs that, merciless, continued to torment him for the next few minutes - unable to put a limit to that awkward awakening.

Awareness of having witnessed the death of his three companions, without having been able to do anything to avoid it. Without urging them to leave, even though he knew they would never leave him alone, but the fact of not having freed them from their duties with an order was devouring him from inside. Try, at least.  
But Thor did not. And he wondered why, wiping the tears with the back of his hand and then resting his forehead on his arms, closed on himself, knees to his chest.

He spent about half an hour before he could gather all the pieces of himself: despair about his friends, then turned into anger about the continued inaction of his powers. Loki was still aware of consciousness, yet Thor had come out of the cave to scream all his pain, venting on the enormous amount of snow that was now blocking part of the passage.  
It was morning and the day had not started well. Thor had never been anxious in all his life, he had always taken the events with shining anger and never despair, yet his inner vessel was beginning to fill dangerously. And this was affecting his lucidity.

He ran his hand over his forehead, nervously arranging the strands of hair stuck to his face, breathing long to recover calm and not panic. With Loki fainted, lost in nothing, hungry and with Asgard in the situation that was, panic was useless - he thought, to get a little courage.

He went back inside, deciding to start from the basics of things: examine his brother's condition and try to wake him up. He had thought of continuing downstream to seek help, but he would never have left him alone, unconscious.

He knelt by his side: the light now filtered through the cavern and illuminated everything, exacerbated by the reflection of the snow and Loki looked pale blue, although his cheeks were pervaded by a more intense color.  
If the sight of his brother in the firelight seemed almost a surreal image, he was more than real now, in its blue and its brands, at the light of the day.  
But Thor only allowed himself a moment's hesitation - his hand in midair - before resting his palm on his brother's forehead, finding his sweaty skin far too hot for a Jotun. At the touch, Loki's lips moved in a disjointed whisper, just as the fingers tried to cling to something.  
The wound inflicted by Hela did not seem to get worse, but Loki certainly was not well.

"Loki ... Loki, can you hear me?"  
Thor put a hand on his non-injured shoulder and the other on his abdomen, shaking him a couple of times decisively: under his touch, Loki trembled visibly and Thor managed to capture the red of his eyes for a moment, before he closed them again. He remained staring at him with his lips closed and his hands to press lightly, while his brother mumbled something indistinct.

"What should I do, Loki ... What do you need ?!"

Thor cursed at that moment his total ignorance in magical arts, because he was anything but a damned healer. And Loki needed a healer. He shook him again a couple of times - he had taken him by the torso and held tight in his arms: Loki had leaned his forehead on his chest, one of the two horns that persistently propped his shoulder.

It was at that moment that Thor's fingers lingered on what looked like a scar and not a mark. He pulled out of the light source, to examine it carefully - it was smooth, very precise, but quite extensive. He wondered how he had managed not to notice it until recently, but that thought all around him stopped.

There was a scar on Loki's belly. His eye stopped to look at it, his fingers to test the contours ... There was that one. Thor tightened his lips: holding his brother's body lifted with one shoulder, he passed his other hand reaching the middle of his back, because ... It could not be - he muttered to himself.

The breath died in his throat: that was a scar of a mortal wound, of that wound - impossible for him to forget. And no, it was not possible - he screamed his mind so much to stun him with that imaginary din.

He leaned Loki on the ground, shifting to him, balancing - his fingers resting on his ruined skin. The heartbeat of his heart, his forehead beaded with icy sweat and ... he had not noticed that Loki stared at him with half-closed eyes.

A thrill below him made their eyes meet - and the red mingled with the blue. Thor swallowed - hard, this time.

"Thor ..."

"Hey ..." Thor's trembling hands reached his face, gently caressing him. "How do you feel?"  
Loki shivered again - a shudder all over his body, quite violent. He took a couple of breaths, with difficulty.

"Hot…"

The God of Thunder turned abruptly towards the entrance of the cave and then looked back at his brother a couple of times, at first doubtful, then decided. He should have thought of it first - he felt himself an idiot. He started out, picked up a big handful of snow and knelt next to him, scattering a little on his arm.

"… All right?"

Loki exhaled a long breath, nodding his head and squinting.

 

He woke up a couple of hours later, looking like a snowman. He sat up, rubbing his forehead - a dull ache in the middle of his eyes, a badly concealed imprecation in the instant he tried to move his right shoulder, as a response to the atrocious pang. Why the hell was he buried into snow?!

The light that filtered through the cave dazzled him and took a moment to focus primarily on the place where he was, then his own hand. And those signs on the back of it.

The scream broke in his throat, his hand trembled. The light of the entrance was partially obscured by the outline of a man: Loki looked up in terror at the sight of his brother, and kicked several times, trying to back away, while Thor was all out of breath and approached him, hands on.

"Don’t touch me!"

The shoulder betrayed him the instant he leveraged to move, collapsing on the right side, but did not give up. Not even when Thor's hand closed around his left wrist.

"DO NOT TOUCH ME!" He shouted.

Loki's eyes were two terrified rubies and that vision was to break the heart, because what Thor read in those eyes was horror, fear and shame. It was something very discouraging, something terribly complex to explain and deal with.

"Loki, calm down".

He jerked to free himself but all he gained was a painful twist of his arm. He was kneeling on himself, looking like a wounded fawn trying to escape a trap or its hunter. But Thor didn’t let go, even when he felt the temperature of Loki's skin come down suddenly.

"It's all right, everything's fine-"  
"No, everything is NOT fine!" 

His breathing was tremendously short, his body trembled and he could not help but try to free himself from that grip, which he could not break with his strength, try to escape as far as possible from Thor's gaze.

And the temperature decreased. Thor gritted his teeth, sensing his skin begin to burn and Loki noticed this.

"Leave me!"

"No!"

"Thor!"

The feeling became unbearable, but Thor was determined not to get crushed. If Loki had wanted to disappear from his sight - and it was clear why he was reacting like that - then he would have to do it with his own strength.

He released his grip on his wrist when he could no longer bear, grasping the bear skin next to it. Loki was thrown back, but before he could stand up and do anything, Thor used the skin to tighten and lock him. He realized that it might seem a rough gesture, but he knew just as well that if he let go, Loki would have escaped. Again.

"What the hell-?!!"

"Here's what I do and now, for the Norns, CALM DOWN! "He thundered - the echo of his voice in the whole cave - the hand not engaged to tighten the two sides of the blanket, fit to press on his back.

Loki held back the thrills, bent over himself. Shame ... With all the things that could happen, just that absurd and cruel situation. Right in front of his brother’s eyes.

Then he bent his head, resting his forehead on his own knees. When Thor realized that Loki had stopped fighting him and was really trying to calm down, he stopped pressing and his hand went to caress his back, in long reassuring gestures. He squinted his eyes, then took them to the ceiling of the cave, cursing everything and everyone for that tragic and ridiculous situation.

"Can I take this blanket, or risk ending up like Rogers?" He asked with a hint of irony, a few minutes later, to break that absurd tension. Loki did not answer, a shudder along his back, but moved his head in agreement. Thor let go slightly.

"You know that if you try to escape again, you'll end up in here again, will not you?" And the question followed an indistinct mumble from his brother, but Thor swore it was a curse against him - good thing, he judged.  
He took the leather off and set it aside, watching Loki emerge from his bent position on his knees. His hands were pressed against his face, covering himself.

"Hey ..."

Loki turned slightly, opening the space between fingers, so that he could exchange a brief glance with his brother. His jaw was contracted in a movement of extreme nervousness.

"Take your hands off your face, Loki," Thor said softly, reaching out, but Loki retreated like a snake bite.

"I told you not to touch me!"

Thor sighed intensely, raising his hands "Ok. Ok, as you want. But you've been like that since yesterday, I've already watched you for a whole day and I do not care abo-"

"It matters to me" Loki truncated, turning his back and lowering his hands, watching them then clenching his eyes as if to deny that all this was real. He felt so helpless, so vulnerable, so naked. And the shame for that condition had immediately risen up his throat, like a bitter morsel - to find himself facing Thor. Him. Not a random person, just his brother. This thought was obsessing him from the moment he had regained his senses.

He drew several runes in the air, but nothing. His seidr exhibited a minimal attempt to recompose his appearance, but then slipped away like sand between his fingers.

"What's up?" Thor echoed behind him, still kneeling - now with his hands in his lap, waiting for Loki to decide to move from that uncomfortable position.

"I-" initially replied Loki, and then clearing his throat "I cannot recover my Aesir appearance".

"Why? It’s the wound? "

"No," Loki continued with a gesture of the head "I don’t think so. But I think I have an explanation: it has never happened to me, but I think I exhausted my seidr ".

He turned slightly, looking up at Thor's and immediately regretted his choice.

"Don’t look at me like that, please."

Thor frowned, confused. At that point Loki decided to turn completely towards him - what he meant as personal dignity, now thrown to the wind.

"As well as?"

"I see the terror in your eyes, Thor," he hissed coldly and the scornful expression "For the Norns, you're a bloody open book."  
Thor tightened his lips, then his fists.

"You're misunderstanding ... If what you say corresponds to reality, then we're both lacking our powers," he explained. Loki stared in surprise at the news, but Thor nodded softly at the sad reality of things.

"This scares me," he continued in a measured voice. "The fact that I have no idea where we are, how we ended up here and the fact that we are without food in the snow. I thought about moving downstream, but I didn’t want to leave you alone" he went on, while Loki slowly stood up and went to retrieve his still wet suit. Thor followed him with his eyes, with extreme caution, but did not move from his seat.

"We must to go back to Asgard-"

"Yes and then? How do you think you can fighting Hela without powers? "Was Loki's scornful question while dressing up" You'd have been killed if I had not arrived in time, do you remember that at least? We are alive by miracle, we have fallen from the Bifrost and if it had not been for a portal in the water at this time we would have died ".

"..."

Thor bit his tongue. He wanted to argue, but reasoned that the last thing useful at the time was to argue with his brother, as usual.

"We cannot stay here and leave Asgard to his fate," he replied, standing up and rubbing his knees. Then he looked up at his brother, who tortured his lower lip with his teeth.

"The problem is, I don’t even know where the “here” is".

There was a long moment of silence. Thor looked around, lost, the frustration that was devouring him from the inside, while Loki examined the sore wound and adjusted his clothes as best he could.

"How's your shoulder ...?" He asked reluctantly.

"It pains. If I recover a minimum of powers, I could try to cure myself in some way, but it will not be enough. And I doubt we find a healer that know how to treat this wound ... I do not know. "

Thor approached, at that point. Loki stiffened again, his eyes wide and shiny: despite this, he allowed his brother's hand to lean on his shoulder.

"Listen: first we go down to the valley, we need food. And then we'll see, ok? Are you able to walk? "

Loki nodded silently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr: https://maximeshepard-beavakarian.tumblr.com/


	9. Nine

Loki narrowed his eyes, annoyed by the intense light that was reflected in the snow: contrary to the previous day, the sun almost roared and the white blanket that covered the ground had proved almost a trap, as the snow was melting rapidly, drenching everything.

The thermal excursion was remarkable, the climate of that place could be very changeable within a few hours. They had stopped behind the river, following for most of their journey, judging the best way not to get lost in that forest: Thor then decided they should put something on them stomach and had worked to get a couple of lances from a tree trunk, previously knocked down. 

With bare hands. Under the gaze of Loki watching his brother tear the wood between clenched teeth - his arms folded.

Meanwhile Thor ravaged the local flora and started - then - to hunt anything that place offered, Loki had spent time studying the sky of that place: standing at the edge of the waterfall, with the valley opened before him, he observed, surprised, that huge, bluish and threatening column that stood in front of him.

It was as if the whole valley was enclosed in a bubble, in a sphere and, beyond the expanses covered with snow and soft grass, where the gaze lingered on the horizon, there was almost a physical limit, a margin, a drawn border a deeper blue that, gradually, darkened and thickened in a shapeless heap of ... He did not know if they were clouds, if it were parts of a huge storm or something that tricked his eyes.

But it was something he had never seen before, in the only portion of the view that the mountain allowed. Because for all the good hour that he had been left alone to observe it, seemed to be still - it was more than certain that storm had not moved.

 

He stretched out his right hand in front of him, moving his fingers in the sun's rays and concentrated on summoning his seidr: slowly, a bright green flow came out of his fingers, descending first along the palm and then along the wrist, lingering in that area, before emitting an intermittence a couple of times and turning off completely.

He bit his lower lip, breathing long from his nose and then uttered a whipped sigh. He put his hand on the sore wound and repeated the process: the green light gave off a slight glow, he felt for a few moments the beneficial effect, but it lasted too little.

His hand slipped along the arm, the fingers went to tighten vehemently the part marked of light blue, almost to want to erase those signs. Then he lifted his head, leaving his grip, the moment he heard Thor's footsteps in the distance.

 

"We should try to overcome the left side of the mountain," Loki commented, biting a large piece of meat and pointing to the rocky slope not far from them.

Thor was back with a booty that would allow a couple of big meals. They had lit a fire - with difficulty - by burning the wood of the arms of fortune that his brother had previously made and then camp and rest a couple of hours. The hours of light seemed long enough.

"Not down to the valley?" Thor asked, placing more meat on the fire. Loki folded the corners of his mouth in a grimace, then he shook his head.

"From the waterfall you have a fairly complete view of the valley. But there are no villages... I'm afraid it's a swampy area. Besides, have you seen what is on the horizon? "

Thor nodded briefly.

"Do you think we'll find something on the other side?"

"I do not know. I only know that we are on a rather high peak and if we find a way around it, from where we are, we can easily take stock of the situation".

 

They consumed the rest of the meal in a thoughtful silence, before it was Thor who spoke again - an anxious note in his voice.

"How's the wound?"

Loki looked up at the sky first, then at his brother. He snorted.

"Like a couple of hours ago. Thor, I will not die for this, do not worry..." he replied, picking up some snow from the boulder next to which he was sitting and biting a bit. His brother raised his hands in surrender.

Loki lowered his gaze and pressed his lips together.

"My seidr is coming back. Very slowly, but look..." he added, showing the faint green light between his fingers. At that revelation, Thor's eyes lit up with a faint hope.  
Because, as never before, they were now completely defenseless and could only rely on their physical strength and ability.

"Yours?"

Thor gave an ironic smile: "It could have been worse."

"Worse than losing an eye?" Loki asked, surprised by the answer.

"I could lose them both".

Loki smiled, shaking his head slightly. His brother did the same, before getting up and pick up one of the wooden lances previously built: he took the longer and thinner, turned it over in his hands several times and then handed it to Loki.

"Here. You did not mind the last time you handled one of these, did not you?" He ironized, recalling the fight on the Bifrost. There, Loki's mind had been clouded by thoughts of a different kind, but the truth was that he knew how to handle Gungnir excellently.

"It's popped".

"Now you want a little too much".

Loki let himself go into a theatrical sigh.

"It will mean that I will settle," he replied, placing the wood on his legs "And yes, I can handle it better than you for sure."

"I did not say this!"

"I say so. You lack the agility and the grace to excel in the art of the spear, I have always told you and the masters have always told you. Do not deny- "

 

A grotesque and chilling scream interrupted that rare moment of tranquility, cutting off Loki – now a wide-eyed look spread on his face, watching his brother kneel before him, suddenly.

That scream was not so close to their position, but it was clear enough that it belonged to something big. Any noise in the forest, after that, ceased to exist and the two could only hear their breaths in an almost crystallized world.

They remained still and motionless for a few moments, until Thor realized that Loki's hand had gone to squeeze the fabric of his now ruined cloak. His hand, slowly, went down to cover the back of Loki's, almost in a reassuring caress, arousing him from stillness.

He immediately released his grip, lowering those red eyes still quite shaken, denying any contact with his brother, quite abruptly - perhaps more than he would have liked.  
"Let’s go" he added dryly, before getting up and heading for the impervious rocks - the lance in his fist. Thor followed him without mentioning a word.

 

What opened up, once the two succeeded - not without risking to fall a couple of times in the void - to cross that pace, was a view that awakened in them a hope.

Along one of the portions of that massif, in the rock a city had been excavated. From that point it seemed not so big, but Loki managed to determine the deceptive prospect, stating that it could only be the highest part of it. The morphology of that part changed radically from the immense valley left behind, winding away on the heights that made up the massif itself in its lower parts.

However, both had to confront two particularities: the first, was that the "monster" on the horizon was also present on the opposite side of the visual. Similarly, huge black and bluish clouds mingled with the blue of the sky, almost like mountains. Here, however, the huge hurricanes that made up this less than reassuring picture seemed much sharper.

"This place seems to be a snow globe, like the ones I saw on Midgard," Thor had commented absently, leaning on a rock with his elbow and passing his thumb on his lip thoughtfully. Loki gave him a questioning look, to which his brother replied with a submissive wave of his hand.

The second peculiarity was that the forest at that point was falling sharply and it would have been equally difficult to go down, if not impossible. But now, they had a direction and going back and trying the passage further downstream would not have been a problem.

 

By the time they returned beyond the slope, emerging in the snow-covered forest, the night was approaching. So they decided to camp for the night, in a recess not far from where they had come down, lighting a fire again - even if they decided to sleep in shifts, to stay on guard. 

Despite setting a course, Loki soon realized that Thor's mood had changed, down the mountain. Immediately he thought that his wounds were bad - they had to climb with the sole force of the hands in several points - but he understood, by his muteness and his drawn expression, that there was much more. 

However, he did not know how to behave, even when Thor consumed only a few mouthfuls of his dinner - from the ruined cloak he had made a small bag to carry the leftovers of lunch - in a long silence, which was absolutely not from him. 

Every now and then he glanced at him with questioning glances. His mind was beginning to travel wildly and the more that silence remained, the more Loki felt the need and the sensation of running away, away from him. 

For the umpteenth time he looked at his hands, reluctantly bringing the food to his mouth, when he realized that Thor was trembling with cold, even though he was sitting practically in the small fire. He had cleaned the snow by sitting on a small rock in front of it, but it was evident that was not enough to keep him from getting wet. And the cloak alone, wrapped around the shoulders and neck, was not enough either. 

With indecision, he got up in two steps, and then pulled off the belt that held his dress closed. Thor had raised his face in his direction, frowning. He moved toward him, slipping the sleeves of his dress along his arms. 

He undressed slowly, overtaking his brother, who kept his eyes fixed on the fire. A moment later, he wrapped him in that piece of fine material, surrounding his shoulders with his arms and kneeling in the snow. 

Thor shuddered instinctively, then melted into that embrace and brought his knees to his chest - his forehead leaning on Loki's wrists. 

"Thanks ..." he exhaled.

 

Loki did not answer. 

He then went back to his feet, but Thor's hand closed around his forearm, pulling him toward. It was Loki, now, shaking, while his brother returned his arm to his knees and put the forehead back on his hands. 

He found himself having to sit behind him, resting his chest on his back: with a heavy look, he touched Thor's shoulder with his cheek, and then pressed lightly. 

"In this way, you will continue to tremble in the cold" he murmured, in th shoulder of his battle armor. Thor tightened his lips, losing his gaze in the flames that danced in the bonfire, almost to feel his eyes burn. 

"It doesn’t matter," he replied in a whisper. Then he lifted Loki's arms gently, an eye on his brother's wound, slipping gradually into the crook of his chest and resting the nape on his collarbone. 

Loki felt the pulse of his heart hammering insistently on the leather of the armor - the result of that gesture so unusual on the part of Thor. He felt therefore every groove, every buckle, every ornament on his skin, in a rough contact that reminds him of home, childhood. Love. 

Loki's hands gripped the fabric around Thor’s chest and his cheek met his brother's long beard, in a wrinkled caress. 

 

"I spent the whole afternoon realizing that I will never see them again". 

He was obviously talking about Fandral, Volstagg and Hogun, who fell in battle before his eyes. Loki looked down at those words and the bitter truth: he had foreseen it, he knew it would end like that, unfortunately. Since he had left Thor and the Warriors Three with Hela, he knew it could be the last time he met their faces and only thanks to Heimdall's providential intervention in his mind, he had miraculously managed to save both from an announced end. Because even if they fought side by side, they would not have escaped anyway.

A sob rebounded in Thor's throat, shaking his body from the foundations - a dull, dull rumble coming from his chest. Loki's cheek got wet at that moment.

"We will sell them. We'll take Asgard back and sell them, Thor. "

"Loki, please, don’t-" he added between sobs, but at that point all the pain held up until that moment exploded in a bitter cry and without the possibility of consolation, unable to go beyond. He clenched his fingers in the skin of his brother's forearms, looking for a handle.

"I gave you my word".

Loki hugged him, with all the strength in his body. It seemed like an eternity since Thor had returned to the palace and it had all started, since Odin had left, since Hela had appeared. The emotions of those hours that barely covered a time span of two days, were mixed together, making themselves mutable, splitting each part of his soul, bringing out again that extreme need of contact that Loki felt towards his brother, as it had not been since his world collapsed on himself. And so it was also for Thor.

His tears rolled down his face. He found himself squinting convulsively, struck by a wave of extreme pain, regret, while for the first time he found himself having to console and support his brother.

"I will not leave you".


	10. Ten

"Do you think it can work?"

Sif was propped up with his shoulder at the entrance, where the wide doors led into that room carved out of the rock millennia ago, his nervous gaze watching, from time to time, the path that led to it.

Heimdall had moved his worn cloak from his shoulders, settling his long braided hair along his back, before moving a few steps toward her. The first survivors had taken their place in that dusty, almost forgotten salon, settling the few belongings they had managed to bring with them, and in all of this the Guardian had given themself only a few words of comfort and encouragement.

Otherwise, it was closed in a granite silence since he had met halfway with Sif, the moment when they had both gone to the heart of the city.

"Heimdall ..." she added, at the end of her patience. She was stretched like a violin string, tired and scared as ever.

"It must work... As long as Thor doesn’t return," he merely answered, bridging the distance and stopping at his side - those shining eyes on the path, the expression terribly contrite. Sif looked at him openly trying to read something more, but the Guardian had deliberately set his sights elsewhere.

Heimdall knew that both had remained as the last bastion for the salvation of Asgard and his people. The last temporary bulwark to resist Hela: he knew Thor and Loki were not dead, but he had lost them in the interweaving of souls that composed the cosmos. And only he would know how to find them, but in that situation he needed the conditions to carry out such research - conditions that he did not have.

"Listen, I'll go back to the city to look for the others. Meanwhile, I will do my best to bring as many inhabitants as possible upon my return, "replied Sif, taking the road to the city, but Heimdall's hand stopped her.

He looked at her, a deep and penetrating look, in silence for a few seconds, undecided about how to say her that news. Sif raised an eyebrow, perplexed.

"You will not find them" was the bitter response from the Guardian.

Sif bit his lower lip, widening his eyes. She bit his lip to make it bleed, her heart suddenly mad, hammering his chest with a force that would break her breath, but she did not utter a word.

 

With his fingers he untangled the blonde lock that had coiled around his hand, placing it behind his brother's ear, and then rubbing the base of his thumb absently on his still wet cheek. Thor's breaths were long and regular: after those words and that long hug, it did not take long for him to give up the day and fall into sleep.

Loki had remained like that, with his arms around his brother's body, Thor's forehead immersed in his black curls, leaning against the crook of his neck. The tremors were gone, the fingers of Thor's right hand were intertwined with his, in a barely hinted grip, carried to his chest.

He had been agitated in his sleep on one occasion, but Loki's voice had managed to calm him down immediately. And Loki was there, sitting on that rock, doing the first vigil on that cold night: the fire continued to crackle, the forest was immersed in a calm and relaxed silence and, despite that bitterness and his shoulder, which had begun to be heard again, a sigh of relief slipped from his lips. The frantic events of those two days, it seemed, had found an end and allowed themselves to relax in those quiet hours of night, lulled by each other breath.

Loki felt emptied, for better or for worse. Never in his life he felt so vulnerable to Thor and himself, he had ever thanked so much the fact that there were no reflecting surfaces, if not the mirror of water. But during the day, he understood one thing: the disquiet he felt, the shame, was his and his alone.

He pressed his lips to that thought. Thor, beyond the first glances, seemed to behave as if his appearance did not really bother him as it would disturb any other Asgardian and he knew that he was a very bad actor to lie. He did not know if Thor had really surpassed that secret long concealed by Odin, but, silently, Loki was grateful that he did not feel himself a monster every time his eyes rested on him.

He was grateful that Thor was behaving as usual - though perhaps a little embarrassment was in his eyes. But in that sky-colored eye, he did not read contempt.

He picked up the golden lock between his fingers, fiddling with caution.

Although grateful, that situation for him was equivalent to going around completely naked. He had understood - interpreted - that the spell of Odin had been linked to his seidr - was the only possible explanation: by exhausting it, here that mask, that facade, had fallen apart.

However, Loki was surprised to be able to keep all that control, before Thor's eyes: certainly, by necessity, he had to leave behind his fears, his feelings, his panic. But every time it was a question of interacting, he felt as if his whole body was pierced by thousands of pins. But he remained there, lucid.

He sighed loudly. At least that condition would have been reversible, he thought - at least Thor had finally seen who he really was, whispered an invisible shadow to his ear. Was there to be satisfied? Had he finally taken off a weight?

He doesn’t know. What he did for sure was the drama, at this moment, was not just about his condition: Asgard had to be reconquered, there wasn’t so much room for personal reflection, moments to cry on and maybe ... Maybe that's why Loki he felt different, this time, less desperate, less scared.

Less ... Monstrous. He curled the lock of hair around his forefinger, his eyes resting on Thor's relaxed expression and observing those features of a rare beauty. It was in those moments when he was alone and in silence, that his cynicism turned against him.

"... See what happens not wanting to let me go?".

The perfection on Thor's face remained so even with that wound that had deprived him of an eye. The Prince, indeed no, the King of Asgard - Loki gave a bitter sneer at that thought - lay in his arms, abandoned to sleep, his long blond hair falling softly over his shoulders, his expression serene but at the same time fair. But so vulnerable.

His lips slightly parted, full lips, perfect. Thor was perfect ... Not like him.

He suppressed a sigh, then passed his thumb on his brother's lower lip - an extremely delicate gesture, an imperceptible caress.

"The day you’ll be able to look at me how my eyes look at you, will be the day you finally understand everything about me ..." he whispered, bowing his head, his left hand to raise his brother's chin and turn his head towards himself.

He touched his lips with his own. It lasted a moment, in which Loki desisted, biting his lip first and closing his eyes, then moving along his cheek, leaving a strip of delicate kisses to rest his lips on his temple, feeling the regular beat of Thor flowing under his skin.

He closed his eyes, tears dangerously facing and ready to slide down his cheeks. But he did not allow it.

 

Loki realized he had fall asleep, cradled in that sweet warmth, when that beastly scream broke again the silence of the entire forest, making them both startle and signaling themselves as terribly close.

In a rapid movement they flattened behind the rock, motionless, exchanging alarmed looks from time to time when the grunts in the distance, followed by a din of broken wood and leafy branches.

That stillness, broken only by a few gasps and breaths between the teeth, lasted as long as the grunts and rumbles as if an unusual creature's footsteps began to grow closer and closer to their direction.

Loki, at that point, decided to move, emerging from the rock and pulling his brother by the arm: Thor tried to free himself from the grip, but Loki's grip seemed to be of steel, making him vehemently turn in his direction.

"Wait-"

"No! I will not stay here to die to satisfy your curiosity! "He hissed between his teeth, trying not to raise too much his tone and tugging Thor putting all the strength and weight possible to move him from there.

"And where- We must hide. Loki, it's pitch dark, we'll lose! "

"Not gonna happen".

"How can you say that ?!" Thor retorted, stopping both in the race just begun, clinging with his free hand to a tree trunk nearby. At the tug, a large handful of snow fell on both.

"Because I can orient myself in the dark," Loki confessed, looking up quite terrified at the source of the terrible noises.

Thor lifted his eyelash, starting to walk again. "You could have said it before ..." he murmured, squeezing Loki's hand into his and running again, taking care not to fall into the ground covered with fresh snow.

Running at night, in a forest where about a meter of snow had fallen in the last hours, was not a simple thing: they stumbled several times, only getting up again to see that this creature could be really fast and that it was really pointing towards their direction, as if to follow them intentionally.

They could not take a distance advantage. Eventually, they could stop the race and seek shelter on the trees, silently hiding in the branches, but would have risked perhaps the worst - to fall from a considerable height or be crushed.

A new scream, a big moan and Thor turned abruptly.

"Loki-"

"What is it ?!" the brother replied sharply, breathless now, legs burning from the effort to run with the snow at the knees. Thor had slowed, turning in the direction of the trees that were gradually broken, some uprooted totally.

Thor had already heard that voice, that sort of lamentation interspersed with grunts, but he could not remember who it belonged to. But he had no way of thinking any further, when several darts darted in their direction, one of which licked his right flank.

He cursed, pressing on the wound, feeling one of the worst sensations of his life, as if he had been hit by a burning ember. He tried to recover the speed of his race, but he felt his legs remarkably heavy and that feeling followed the cry of pain of Loki, who rolled on the ground, cursing loudly.

He had ended up in a trap: a huge trap clutched his flesh at the knee, covered with a strange, sticky golden liquid that looked almost like honey.

Thor's primary instinct was to reach him, however a deafening roar followed by sharp peaks and absurd frequencies stunned both, so much to force Loki to immobility and Thor himself to lean on a trunk - his hands pressed to his ears, feverishly searching for the own orientation.

All of a sudden, a huge - and very familiar - silhouette emerged from the darkness of the forest and Banner, or rather Hulk, jumped both in the race with a huge leap, leaving a trail of destruction behind him.

There was silence, broken only by the breathless breaths and the steps of Hulk that were moving further and further away. Fu Loki the first to speak, taking up the thread of his curses, trying with his hands to open the trap and being able to free, to roll towards his brother.

Thor took a step forward, but his vision clouded. Loki was pressing the wound - the same burning sensation that Thor had felt shortly before, when he had been smeared by the dart.

"Thor-!" He called, clenching his teeth - a strangled moan - seeing his brother stagger. He tried to get up to give him support, but at the same time he gained a precarious balance, two darts hit his chest.

He coughed. He coughed vehemently, writhing on himself: the pain was enough to suffocate him. Dragging on his back and extracting those darts from his chest, with a dry gesture, he reasoned that the damned yellow substance - present on both darts and on the cutter - should be a poison or a sedative. Terribly powerful, as Thor had come face to face in the snow, after more darts had reached his back.

His vision clouded and he felt the dizziness clearly, before feeling several steps all around him: he raised his head, murmuring something. His left hand brushed against Thor's, not far from him.

He saw some hooded figures approaching, then leaving room for one of them, who slowly revealed his face hidden under the dark fabric: it was a woman with black hair and strange white stripes on her face. Her eyes were as deep as night.

He started to speak, but the woman stuck another dart in his chest with her bare hands, in a sudden jerk and with unprecedented strength and cruelty. He did not even have a way to moan in pain.

His last thought was to judge, with a vein of sarcasm, the excellent average of both: within about sixty hours Asgard had fallen into the enemy's hand, did not know where they were, had lost their powers and were managed to lose consciousness twice.


	11. Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year to all of you! ^^

"I've never seen an individual ... like him."

"It's a Jotun. Although his dimensions are certainly not those of a Frost Giant, I can assure you that he is one of them. You do not find many around ".

In his feeble peaks of consciousness, Loki could hear excerpts of conversation between - apparently - two women bustling around him. His vision was terribly blurred in those moments, he could not understand where he was and how he tried to grasp some details on the environment or on the interlocutors, everything became irremediably dark, throwing him again in the loss of the senses.

But he had recognized one of the two voices as belonging to the woman who had knocked him out that night.

"In what condition is the shoulder wound?" The woman echoed. It was impossible for him to recognize if that conversation had followed the previous one, or if minutes or hours had passed. He opened his eyes as much as he could, exchanged a look with a small, very large-eyed humanoid. He was sure he was hallucinating.

"He's improving visibly. Soon this portion should also heal, look ".

Loki gave a weak and strangled moan.

"Is he recovering?"

He looked again at the humanoid: she had female characters, her gaze black and deep, almost liquid. Something on the front, of tapered.

"From time to time, but he does not last ... The sedative on him has had a greater effect than the other".

"At least that shit works on them ..."

The woman of that night also entered his field of vision: he paused on the white signs tattooed on his face, then descended on his neck, gradually downwards. Still trying to figure out where the hell she had pulled out all that force to stab him in the chest.

"Better this way ... Try to heal him as I told you before he wakes up. If he does, put him back. We already have our problems with the other, "he added, reaching for the wound.

Loki's gaze fell on the strange tattoo in the inside of her arm: he had already seen that drawing, it was very special ... But he was struggling to find a place in his memory.

Pain. This time stronger. Probably he moved and found himself with the woman to hold him by the shoulders and the other to tinker with the wound. It was damn bad ... Damn.

"Put him back to sleep ..."

"Roger, Hildi".

Damn.

 

Thor, on the other hand, was awake. Awake and very pissed off. He had found himself in a circular cage made of a substance that resembled glass, much like the one Shield had built to eventually contain Hulk and in which Loki had locked him up in the New York business. They could not know it, but they had fully guessed the arrangement ... Without his powers, in that cage, he would not have managed to escape.

"Where is my brother!" He had roared, in front of the woman sprawled before him on the bare stone, bottle in hand. She deigned to look at it from time to time, amused by all the commotion.

The reason why Thor was in that cage was simple: she had given him a minimum of confidence, but he had thrown it to the wind. As usual. She had given him rules, but to Thor those rules were tight and the explanations for that treatment were too thin and unsatisfactory.

And there was no time. Thor had no time. So, he decided to take the situation straight, the problem was that the situation had then taken directly to him in the face. His pride had been hurt again, as it had done several times in the last days: but finding himself on the ground after that mysterious woman had first collected, then dodged, most of his blows had been the last straw.

And most importantly, Loki was no longer with him. Until recently, Loki was slowly recovering from Hela's wound, without his powers and this thought had become pounding, haunting. Thor was an open nerve, a violin string stretched beyond belief, without lucidity and at the mercy of his own rage. If Loki had seen him in that state, he would certainly have despised him - this was what he said to himself, but he could not find a single reason to calm down.

He had begun to pound his fists furiously against the transparent wall, until his knuckles bleed.

"The moment I can get out of here, I swear to you on my honor" and his voice sounded like a roar of thunder "You will not want to find yourself here!"

He tapped his palms hard against the glass, the short breath that went to tarnish, dull to the pain. The woman grinned, sipping the bottle again tightly in her palm.  
"Strong words, from a prisoner I'm thinking whether to free or not ..." was her ironic comment, while she put the bottle on the ground and crossed her legs. Then she put her elbows on her knees and her chin on the back of her hands.

"Your brother is fine, we are dealing with him. Now talk to me again about Hela, " she continued, as Thor watched her with an exasperated look.

"Why are you so interested in this story?"

"I'm me here who ask questions," she answered, but Thor did not give up. He pressed his fist against the wall with extreme decision.

"No, it's none of your business! And I do not pretend they are. I swear to you on what you want, let me recover my brother and Banner and we'll leave".

The woman raised her black eyes to the scarred face of the God of Thunder. That scornful grin continued to be painted on her face, which made Thor blood boil.

"What you call Banner ... Do you have any idea what size it has on its head? I do not like repeating myself, Son of Odin, who has nothing to prove it. Who calls a brother a being with whom he clearly does not share his blood. And that has trespassed in a system in which his law and his words are worth as much as the waste paper"she pressed, pausing to emphasize at best every concept.

Thor lowered his head, sighing for a long time. It was useless to try to reason with that person and, clearly, to get out from there he would have to leverage all his strength - as long as it was possible.

"Ah, for your information," she added, standing up "That cage was made by the Dwarf, with all its merits and surprises. Have fun, " she said, picking up the bottle and waving goodbye, while Thor silently cursed inwardly at the revelation.

"Wait ... I-"

He swallowed his own pride. The woman stopped, continuing to give her back, but her ears were alert.

"Please. If you do not want to get me out of here, it's okay. But do not hurt him. "

He heard a low laugh, before she turned for one last time.

"As much as I want that monster to disappear, I'm not so stupid as to unleash a Frost Giant in here. Even if the conditions in which he pours are pitiful and, believe me, he gives me a certain tenderness" was her dry answer, an answer that left Thor speechless.

That woman knew Loki was a Frost Giant and spat those words with such a familiar hatred that the breath stopped in his throat. And she had fought him and beaten him with her bare hands.

Thor's eye widened in the darkness of that dungeon. A thought began to make its way into his mind.

 

When Loki woke up, he found himself alone in that room, which looked like an infirmary, located in an underground facility - no windows, only air ducts, a thick door on the wall opposite to him. He tried to sit up, but realized he was literally chained to the cot. Then he began to look around cautiously coming to glimpse the surveillance camera right at the top left corner of his bed.

He looked up at the sky, cursing between his teeth.

Would it have been a chore in terms of time to come to terms with these people who had bothered to treat him, but to put him in some sort of detention? Because he remembered it well, in his waking moments: they had appealed to him as a prisoner. He had been captured, sedated. Who knows how long, then, he had stayed down there.

Who knows where Thor was.

He took a long breath. Despite being tied up like a salami with a chain made of a material that went beyond the common resistance - had tried to wriggle, but in vain - he felt good. His strength had returned to normal and his shoulder was felt only with a slight annoyance and some occasional twinge.

He raised his chin and his neck to try more decisively to remove at least one arm, when his eyes fell on the profile of his hand.

Pink. It was pink.

He exhaled all the air in his lungs, letting himself fall back onto his cot. He began to laugh softly, until some tears rolled down his cheeks and went to wet his ears.

He had summarized his Asgardian form: this meant that his seidr had normalized itself again. And it meant that his magic was back.  
This changed many things.

He saw the camera again, displaying a defiant grin. Surely they would come sooner or later to visit him, so it was worth trying to do what he wanted to do now: if he could not move from there, he would send his double to take a nice tour of that structure.

He could have freed himself with time and patience, but he had decided to use his methods. He roughly calculated the blind spot of the camera, then generated an astral projection - which immediately vanished through the walls.

He rested his head on the pillow and closed his eyes: now he had to concentrate so as not to be discovered.

 

"Loki ?!"

"Shhh! Damn, do you want to be heard by the guards? "

It took him a long time to find his brother, wandering far and wide through the underground structure, discovering that he was imprisoned many floors underneath the infirmary.  
He was then able to evade the guards, crossing the walls: fortunately for them, Thor was not guarded by any camera.

"Did they hurt you? How are you?"

Their gaze met and Loki was honestly struck by the apprehension he read on his brother's face. An apprehension which, just as honestly, he was struggling to understand.

"They actually healed me. My seidr has normalized, don’t you see? "He answered with a crooked smile" I'm not at my best yet, but I'm working on it. You, rather, are you enjoying a holiday in there? "

Yes, Loki was better, much better - Thor reasoned, receiving the well-known sarcasm straight in the face, sighing softly. He slid his hands down the glass, regaining a standing position.

Part of the transparent wall was cracked, but the damage stopped at the crack that snaked a few inches here and there.

"That woman has a heavy hand. Soon, let me out of here. There must be some mechanism to operate on that console over there. "

Loki sighed in turn, spreading his arms. Many times his brother was really naive.

"Thor, I'm here in astral projection," he asserted, moving towards him and passing the glass to overtake his brother too. He looked around as Thor shuddered at the sensation and turned to him.

"Still nothing?"  
"No…"  
"Brute force?"  
"Are you kidding me? But there's a problem, "Thor said, pointing to several holes in the ceiling of the circular cage." Whenever the structure is damaged, gas comes out of it. And it's not pleasant ".

Loki squeezed his lips, fiddling with his hands and piercing his brother from side to side and examining the cracks on the glass. Thor shivered again.

"Would you mind stopping it?"

But at those words, the two began to hear steps approaching. They exchanged a quick glance.

"How long have we been here?" Loki asked, coming out of the cage quickly. Thor followed him instinctively until he put his hands on the glass again.

"I'm not sure, but I think three days. Why?"

"Give me as many. I'll try to get you out of here, but I have to do it my way and I need time. "

The steps became audible clearly and the guards exchanged greetings beyond the thick door of the cell.

"Loki-"

"Thor, trust me. If you could escape from there, I'm three floors above you. But, please do not send everything upside down ".

Thor frowned, his lips tightening. He wanted to argue, he wanted to talk about many things, but there was no time to do it.

"We need Banner, Loki".

Loki stifled a laugh. Of all the sick ideas, that was really the most absurd and to come face to face with a Hulk hunted and pissed off more than usual was the last of his wishes. However…

The lock on the door turned and the system began to operate.

"Brother-"

"I'll be back. Trust me, "Loki whispered, pointing out with a sweeping gesture of his hand and disappeared beyond the wall. Thor leaned his forehead against the glass, cursing noisily as he followed the woman who, once again, had made her way into the room and sat before him, bottle in hand.

"Good morning, Son of Odin ..."


	12. Twelve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I know there's something wrong in a few points, but I couldn't do a better translation, really. So I hope you will understand this damn chapter. xD

"Oh ... You're awake and ... You're different".

Loki had released his projections a moment before the infirmary sliding door opened and the tiny woman with deep black eyes entered the room. He intentionally found himself fumbling with those chains, reading the astonishment in the woman's eyes in revealing herself in his Asgardian form.  
He gave an embarrassed smile.

"Can you free me?"

A very stupid question, apparently, that of Loki. The woman stepped forward, stopping next to the bed.

"I'm afraid not, but I'll warn the commander that you've regained consciousness. And changed your appearance. Are you a shapeshifter? "She answered, frowning. The pair of antennas on her forehead vibrated slightly.

The embarrassment on Loki's face increased. He swallowed loudly, lowering his eyes and resting his head on the pillow again - hands relaxed at his sides now.  
"A kind ... I'm not very proud of that appearance. I apologize, if I scared you. "

"Oh, no, do not worry. I'm just surprised, that's all, "he replied with a smile and his soft, gentle voice, walking around the cot and fiddling with some device on the long table nearby.

Summarily calm, embarrassed, cooperating, Loki had decided for a low profile, seeking confidence in the first place of what he seemed to remember as his healer. He turned his eyes, then, to his shoulder, moving it slightly, as the chains could afford.

The fingers of his right hand moved imperceptibly.

"I'm glad you're better. You had a wound that was anything but easy to cure, but it's getting better and it should not hurt so soon, "she added, turning with a syringe full of blue liquid in her hand.

Loki stared at her with wide eyes - maybe not so intentionally. He opened his mouth a couple of times, seeing the needle getting wet quickly and gushing a couple of times. Meanwhile, in the palm of his hand, he picked up his seidr: plan or not, he did not have to and did not want to go back to sleep. Not again.

"Please, no ... I do not want to."

The alien raised his antennae together with his eyebrows, in a surprised look. He looked at the prisoner, then the needle, then the prisoner again and put his hands forward.

"Do not worry, it's not a sedative. It’s for the pain ".

Again that sweet smile and that kind, reassuring tone. Loki followed the needle out of the corner of his eye, his arm tending, his power ready to make his way and strike. Hard. But a gesture from the woman stopped him from fulfilling his purpose. He felt the palm of her hand resting on his forehead: instinctively he tried to avoid it but immediately, he felt a sense of calm and relaxation taking possession of his body.

He looked into those puddles of ebony, exhaling first at several repetitions, then exhaling a long breath.

"I do not want to hurt you ... You'll feel better after this, but I need you to stay calm to treat your wound. And I do not want you to feel more pain than necessary ".  
Loki tightened his lips and the needle entered his skin: her lips were not moving, she was communicating directly in his mind.

Empathetic powers and a telepathy. He didn’t consider that and it could be problematic: trying to maintain a concentration that allowed the process, he shielded part of his mind with his magic and let himself be lulled in that feeling of calm.

He felt the pain in his shoulder disappear completely.

"I know you do not trust me ..." he whispered "But believe me, I have no bad intentions".

Loki didn’t answer. He looked at the skin around the wound, amid the loving care of that doctor capable of treating such a wound, a wound inflicted by a God. A gift from Hela. A wound that would hardly be able to heal completely himself and in such a short time alone.

Seriously, where the hell were they? Who were those people?

Suddenly, a precise memory burst into his as a flash from the blue and Loki remembered. He remembered that symbol and where he had already seen it. He remembered who, on Asgard, wore that tattoo on his forearm. He remembered how he and Thor flipped through those books in the evening, before going to bed and fantasizing hours and hours.  
And he understood. Much of what had happened now gained a damn sense.

The question however, was: why?

"Well, I'm finished here. I promise you that these "and pointed to the chains" Will leave soon. Be patient a little longer ".

 

In the next hours of the day, Loki learned a few things: the first was that the healer was called Rekis and that she seemed to have a soft spot for him. Not in the ordinary sense of the term, but it was clear that she had very interested in Loki and in a sense the feeling was mutual.

It was mutual because, to his great satisfaction, Rekis loved to talk. He loved to tell things, which led Loki to a position of advantage, given his skillful dialectic and - let's be honest - his primary attempt to manipulate that being for the main reason: get out of there, possibly with his own legs and with Thor .

Another detail not to be underestimated was the woman's empathic abilities were enormously effective. And this rebalanced the match, as did the handcuffs that had replaced the chains.

The bonus was no longer be tied up like a salami and his imprisonment in that infirmary: not bad, he had thought, always better than a glass bell with a gas nozzle. He had a vague idea about Thor's behavior in that structure, given his temperament… and the words “detention” and “brother”, in the same sentence, had certainly not led to something constructive. Not that he expected something different.

Ergo, Loki would have had to roll up his sleeves and do his own thing. As usual.

 

"So we're in the Nifelheim system? I can hardly believe it, "Loki said, while Rekis was busy changing the medication again.

"Indeed, what the Dwarves built here millennia ago is unbelievable. However, our bubble is destined to cease to exist soon, "she explained, fumbling with the usual blue liquid.  
"Is this ecosystem dying?" Loki asked, raising an eyebrow - a perplexed expression.

"Not exactly. It’s the structure that keeps the bubble active, unfortunately: it’s deteriorating. In fact, it’s now quite damaged and the perimeter lands have been lost gradually over the last two centuries "she continued, preparing the syringe and disinfecting the skin with care.

"Have you had the chance to see in the distance what is there?"

Loki nodded briefly, bringing his mind back to that sort of cloudy cluster of giant-sized vortices, seen on the horizon.

"The climate - or more generally, the atmosphere of Nifelheim, is not kind to life forms. This planet, in particular. When the bubble structure gives way, nothing will stop those monstrosities from erasing the whole ecosystem and regain possession of this piece of land. The climate has already changed a lot in recent years ".

The alien looked down, sad. She anesthetized the wound and proceeded.

"How long will this place last?"

"The most optimistic estimate is a century, more less".

"Why don’t you fix the bubble mechanism?"

The woman stifled a bitter laugh.

"To get your hands on a dwarven technology, you need Dwarfs. And the Dwarfs have left this place millennia ago. Moreover, this place can only be reached through a series of wormhole ... In short, or you end up by chance - as almost all of us - or you have to commit to find it "was the obvious answer, followed by a subdued gesture of the head. Loki watched her carefully put both hands on his shoulder and a golden light spring from her palms.

"But I'm sure we'll soon be able to leave this place," he added in a whisper.

Loki opened his lips.

“This is magical healing art” he vaguely noted, frowning. A magical art that I know well.

The woman smiled, eyes closed.

"Hildi taught me a long time ago," he replied a little later, gently withdrawing his hands.

"Hildi?"

"Oh, yes, sorry. Our commander ".

Loki nodded, looking up at the opposite wall. He didn’t need to know anything else about their commander.

 

For the rest of the day, Thor had not received any visits. Everything around him was made of stone, glass and muffled sounds, and although Loki's visit had raised his spirits and served to calm him for a while, that detention was driving him crazy. 

It was a matter of cause.

The people of that structure were fully committed to the countermeasures taken. The guards had only been put out of jail, as far as he could see. But they had not come to terms with his tenacity.

Surrendering was not in his nature.

And while Loki was thinking of overcoming the barriers by getting around them, Thor had decided to leverage his stubbornness and break them whit his own head. Although Dwarfs and their artifacts were infinitely esteemed, at that moment they had earned every kind of imprecation between one stroke and another, between every slight crack that widened and the long pause given by the gas given off after any minimal damage to the structure.

What was too much for him, though, was not the pain in his hands, it was not the blood that gushed from his knuckles with each punch, in the battle against that damn cage. No.  
It was having to give up every time to sleep, when he would have given the other eye to know what was happening on Asgard. However, he was convinced, sooner or later, that wall would give up and there would be no narcotic to stop his march.

The sixth time he surrendered to the gas, he realized he had created a substantial crack in the structure. And it was a great thing. He would probably have to force one, two times at most to finally get out of there, but he would have done it in time, before the woman with the bottle returned?

The pain in his temples was atrocious, his lungs burned with each breath, while his consciousness sank back into the darkness. He felt himself falling, like every time, unable to move, unable to stop: only this time something different happened.

Thor saw it as a sort of rope in that darkness. He imagined reaching out a hand, felt the roughness of the fabric in his palm and grabbed it, squeezing as hard as he could. He felt himself coming up, as if he had been underwater for too long, he felt as if two powerful hands pulled him up his shoulders.

He opened his eye suddenly, exhaling a breath that resembled a gasp.

And to his astonishment he found himself leaning against one of the columns of the royal palace, in Asgard, before Heimdall and his amber eyes.

"We need you".

 

When the infirmary doors opened, Loki was intent on examining his wound in the mirror not far from the medical plan. The woman with the black hair, gathered in an unmade chignon, had entered like a train, covered with mud and unidentified remains on almost the whole body and, bottle uncorked along the way, she had thrown herself on the bed in the middle of the room, raising the back and sprawling as if she was more comfortable.

Soiling practically every corner of the only place where Loki was able to rest as if it were a human, not an animal.

And indeed, the look that the Prince of Asgard gave her was so hard that he could cut the diamond.

"Wow," he said softly, inhaling harshly - his lips contracted in a grimace of disgust and indignation. "Do it as you please," he added, raising his hands tied in front of him and opening them in an ironic gesture.

The woman grinned in amusement, swallowing the amber liquid of the bottle several times, then resting it between her legs and wiping her lips with the back of her hand.  
"So, do you like the accommodation?"

"I would have liked a window, a little less humidity. A little less… crowd, "Loki began, walking here and there, gesturing as much as the handcuffs allowed.

"People more civil. But I can’t complain. Ah, the medical service is excellent, "he pointed out with a sneer, turning to her.

The woman brought her hands forward, stretching noisily, then crossing and bringing them behind her head, resting and staring at the ceiling with extreme curiosity. Loki's grin spread far more than before. It was a challenge, that one, but oh - not worthy him of attention was a more presumptuous gesture than fearless.

"There are prisoners who would give an arm to get this arrangement".

Loki smiled in silence, passing a hand to settle his hair along his shoulders: he rested his weight on the bench, resting his hands along the thighs, crawling the palms on his knees.

"And I should thank you for your infinite…" and threw that word theatrically "Goodness, Hildi?"

The woman gained a more upright position, bringing her eyes for the first time to her interlocutor.

"Yes, you should thank that one" was his harsh comment.

"A particular name, yours".

"A particular appearance, yours".

This time, Loki let out a soft laugh. He found all this situation ridiculous, to the limits of the absurd: they had been captured without a valid reason, they were serving a detention in a place forgotten by divine grace, in a system of only ice and fog - if not for the Dwarfs and interest in that place.

"As much as I love to chat, I'm a bit short of time. What do you want from us, exactly? "He answered, clenching his jaw and giving her the look of those who no longer wanted to play. The woman snickered to herself, pulling a package out of her jacket pocket. He fiddled a little with the opening, and then grabbed the snack between his teeth.

"I did some research into what you call your brother ..." he began, chewing nonchalantly "The one who desperately kept calling when you were in the arms of sleep. A very sweet scene, if you listen to me, "she added, swallowing it all with a sip of liquor.

"And you have no idea - trust me, you do not have it! – how much those golden curls are worth". She spread her arms to mimic how big the leaning reward was on Thor's head.  
Loki straightened his back, biting his lower lip.

"Are you asking me to sell my brother in exchange for my freedom?" He asked with a hint of disbelief.

"No," she asserted, with a gesture from her head. She expressed a relaxed smile "Not immediately, at least. If it is true that it is the Son of Odin, first you will convince him to help us capture the Beast. Then you will deliver him to us. Do you think your life is worth less than theirs? "

"The alternative?"

The woman inhaled with her nose, in a gesture almost annoying.

"Fall apart with this place. Rekis will certainly have told you about this dwarven ruin - ah, I bet what you want that she tell you ".

Loki got up from where he was leaning and took a couple of steps forward. The expression was now serious, lips tight in a thin line. Hildi looked at him almost astonished.  
He leaned forward a little, bending his back slightly.

"And you really think that a cage like that can hold Thor? That you can deliver your prize with this ease?" He pressed, taking another step forward. He stifled a short laugh "You don’t know who we are, woman".

"I have a little Jutun in front of me, who likes to go around with Asgardian ornaments," she said, shrugging. "And as much as I found this fact curious and funny, the question stops here. You're a bit small for one of your kind ... And you should hate people like Thor, "she added, shaking his head and finding it quite exhilarating.

Loki blinked for a moment, tilting his head to one side.

"Who tells you that I don’t hate him?" Was his seraphic reply, an answer that for a moment surprised the woman. She stood with the bottle in the air, her eyes fixed on him and an ironic grimace on her face.

"You know things about Asgard, to be a bounty hunter ..."

"I have my sources".

At those words, Loki gave his back to her, taking the necessary time and wandering around the room. At each step, both could hear the clang of the chain that connected the handcuffs, to scan the time.

As Hildi was about to speak again, he turned to her, taking a long breath.

"First of all, I want you to take me as far as possible from this place. Secondly, I want a part of Thor's and Hulk’s rewards. These two things are not negotiable, "Loki said, rising to his full height.

"Third ..." and raised his hands handcuffed in front of him "These. To deal with Thor you will need my help and, believe me on the word, it is not wise to provoke him ".

The woman rested her chin on the knuckles of her hand, tapping her knee with her fingers: what Loki threw on the plate was not to be discarded - if he could make the operation less thorny than it would have been without his help.

She stood up slowly, moving towards him. Then she stopped with one hand on her side, the bottle in the other. She had watched him for a long time, during his period of unconsciousness, had talked for a long time with Rekis, while she was testing her emotionality. Could she trusts the judgment of the healer and the stranger in front of her?

Loki filled the space that separated him from her, bringing his arms forward.  
"We have a deal?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About the character of Rekis, I took inspiration from Mantis. ^^


	13. Thirteen

He raised an eyebrow, showing the most reassuring smile, while the woman looked at him through the thick eyelashes, undecided about what to do. The desire to grab her arm and show her the tattoo was a lot, as the desire of pouring on her the right disdain – or at least partly to repay her courtesy, but that was not the plan.

However, when the woman gave in to his request, the alarm of that structure began to ring: immediately, the Valkyrie shifted Loki with a shoulder and began to fumble with the monitor next to the medical table, viewing the cells and Thor who knock down guards with bare hands, outside the area.

"Shit-"

She clenched his teeth in a grimace of despair, turning quickly towards the exit but finding Loki, blocking her way.

"Do we have a deal?!!" he repeated, his eyes wide and his tone of voice high to overcome the noise. They exchanged looks – she dis not want to give up.

"You must narcotize him again immediately, or within ten minutes I assure you that he will destroy this structure by punching," Loki added, pushing her back and showing his hands cuffed.

Running out of time and suppressing his will, Brunhilde took a key from her pocket and set out to unlock the fine device. Loki smiled.

"Come on," she answered dryly, but when the Prince of Asgard did not give way, she raised her face with annoyance, but what she saw was his eyes shining with a sinister light and dimly lit with a bright green.

Every reassurance on his face had disappeared.

"I thought that all the Valkyrie had found a gruesome end".

Those words left the woman stunned and found herself literally caught off guard, when Loki's hand went to tighten her forehead and all the reality around her began to sink, swirling in an abyss of buried memories. The mental connection allowed Loki to see the commander's past and yes, he had taken full advantage of it.

Brunhilde... She had managed to survive Hela's purge in that distant past. The only one left of that noble army to the defense of Asgard, slain by the Goddess of Death, before Odin banished and imprisoned her. He allowed himself to feel sorry, seeing those truculent images. And while the woman's eyes were spilling, he conjured a dagger in his left hand.

With a tug, he untied his grip, moving aside: Brunhilde ended up on all fours, able to recover from the extreme confusion in which she had sunk.

"I am the Prince of Asgard ... Did you really think I sold my brother's head to a traitor?" Loki hissed in her ear. The woman's eyes widened, bringing her gaze to the side to meet his.

"Traitor? I- You, you're a damned monster- "she replied in distress, looking for an upright position, but Loki was quicker and with the handle of the dagger, he struck a blow at the base of her neck, making her lose consciousness. He stood up slowly - his eyes on the motionless figure of the Valkyrie, a wounded expression painted on his face. No matter how thick his armor was: those words always managed to hurt him deep inside.

"And now the monster is free ..." he whispered, before heading past the infirmary door and planting the dagger blade directly into the automatic control system, breaking it.

 

Thor had just turned the corner of the corridor that led to the cells and was about to charge one of the two guards he had faced, when Loki revealed his true features, deflecting his direct punch of his brother and nudging him in the ribs.

"By the Norns, do you always have to do what you want?!" he said in a low voice, but angrily, while Thor massaged his side and laughed.

"You were late" was his answer, greeted by a raised eye to the sky. A long line of unconscious bodies and a great silence developed behind him.

"I was busy with that woman," he replied, annoyed, then placing the palm of his hand on his brother's chest and developing an illusion, to attract as little attention as possible.

"You understand who she is, don’t you?"

Thor, in the guise of one of the defeated guards shortly before, led the way.

"I'm not completely sure, but I think she's an Asgardian," he said in a heavy tone, much to Loki's surprise. His brother nodding, overcoming and leaning over the next corner of the corridor.

"Not a simple Asgardian. She's a Valkyrie, "Loki said with such lightness that Thor turned and stared at him as if he had five eyes on his forhead.

"Are you making fun of me?"

"I should?"

Thor has always had the utmost respect for the Valkyries. He esteemed them, he admired them, there had been a phase of their childhood where he had made the Allmother mad, claiming to become one of them. Sooner or later. All under the comprehensive gaze of Frigga, who no longer knew what to do to convince him that he couldn’t, being a man.  
He had stopped the pace, rather shaken.

"I saw the tattoo on her arm and I probed her memory. She’s a Valkyrie, Thor. Now, it all makes sense: the fact that she has knocked out, the fact that she hates me and does not hide it "he let out a short and brief laugh, then he motioned to walk. He looked at his brother, still.

"Oh, come on, do not make that face... We'll talk later, let's get out of here."

 

They managed to reach the main floor quite easily and now there was nothing left but to look for the exit. All the forces had been mobilized, there was a general confusion all around them, so they tried to mix in the crowd that was directed, armed, towards the ground floor.

Among all those people, Loki did not immediately recognize Rekis. Not until one of the soldiers was running to warn upstairs, that their commander had been wounded and the other prisoner - Loki - had fled.

It was a moment. Thor bumped into the alien, trying to move on and she turned to look at him. He cranked his antennae for a few moments and Loki immediately realized that their disguise would fall apart at any moment.

"Wait a minute," she asked, with that kind gesture, placing herself before Thor and raising her right hand. Meanwhile, from the stairwell, Brunhilde's voice was heard in the distance.

Damn - he thought, conjuring one of his blades and pointing at Rekis's back, taking advantage of the attention of the soldiers aimed at their commander and the guard who preceded her.

"If I were you, I would not do it" he hissed behind her "I know you've felt something, but don’t do it," he added, pressing the tip of the blade to the height of her left kidney. Loki's hand was tight around his right wrist and Rekis shivered.

"What are you doing?" Thor whispered, but Loki resumed his word. "Lock her other wrist, right away," he added and Thor obeyed, without further questions.

"Don’t make me, Rekis. I don’t want to hurt you, but we have to get out of here." The doctor turned as much as Loki's grip allowed to be able to meet his gaze.

"Loki ... Let me go to the commander," the alien whispered faintly, trembling visibly "Or they will notice you".

"No, start walking," Loki ordered, pushing her forward. Thor had resumed his march, throwing glances here and there, traveling next to his brother to be able to lock the doctor's wrist.

"Take us to the exit and then we'll let you go".

"Hildi will be aware of my absence, she will be looking for me" she tried to wriggle, but the grip of both was equal to steel, if not worse. Loki prodded her with the dagger in warning.

They turned the corner and it was Thor who had to deal with the pair of soldiers who stood before him, while Loki had taken Rekis's arms and secured them behind her back. The scene repeated itself several times until it was clear that the trail of fainted people had attracted attention.

 

"The exit is beyond those stairs. You will find yourself behind the great hall of what was once the royal palace of this city, "Rekis explained, as the sounds of excited steps behind them began to grow closer.

"Do you two know each other?" Asked Thor, placing a hand on the alien's shoulders.

"I am the doctor of this structure. I took care of your brother when they caught you. I- "she replied, biting her lower lip, while Loki dropped the illusion and nervously controlled the bottom of the corridor behind them.

"Do not judge the commander's actions" she put his hands forward, trying to explain herself, but Loki shook his head in denial.

"Whatever her motivation is, it's not important at the moment. Or rather, it is, but we do not have time to deal with it, "he added, under the stern gaze of Thor who had not yet digested the news of the woman's identity.

"Thank you for helping us".

Rekis was about to speak when Brunhilde's form appeared at the end of the corridor, followed by several soldiers and her expression was not promising. Thor instinctively moved toward them, but Loki stopped him with his hand.

"There's no time. Sorry Rekis, "he hissed, then squeezed her arm, tugging and throwing her to the ground. The two exchanged a last glance, a nod and then, quickly, went up the stairs until they were in the throne room. They ran as fast as possible. Loki had an idea of where they were, relying on what they had seen from the mountain and judging by the size of the building, it was part of the city that was embedded in the rock.

"We have to go back to the forest and find Banner" Thor suggested, parading along the now decadent colonnade and passing the wide doors. Loki, behind him, shot an annoyed look at the group of pursuers - about twenty soldiers.

"It will not be easy," he replied, recalling his seidr and reaching his brother: they passed the entrance of the building, then descended the immense white steps leading into the square below them, but step by step several guards had begun to gather inside , suitable to close and capture them.  
Loki immediately generated several of his clones, stopping in the shadow of one of the stone columns.

"Keep them occupied as much as possible".

"What do you want to do?" Thor asked, loading the laser rifle. That place was starting to get quite crowded.

"Give me a minute, I'll try to teleport us," he replied, ordering the clones to move. His eyes sparkle bright green and he his himself behind the column.  
The Son of Odin grinned.

"So be it".

 

Loki took a little more than a minute and it was the fourth time that Thor was turning impatiently towards him, between a landed enemy and a dodge. At the fifth glance and the voice of his brother urging him to move, Brunhilde appeared at the top of the steps and it was then that Loki moved, running horizontally along the length of the steps.  
With his eyes fixed on the detected connection of that unknown place, he conjured Gungnir from his pocket dimension and threw it to Thor - who mentally cursed him for not thinking about it before - to be able to overcome the crush of soldiers around him and made a sign to follow him.  
He could hear Valkyrie's footsteps not far from him, but he could not afford to lose his concentration: taking an unknown portal by running and evading the enemies before him, was already very distracting itself.

However, he had to stop his race at some point, collecting his seidr to open the portal. Brunhilde was on him: the blade of her sword went to scratch his right arm, but Thor stood between the two, opposing the spear and the woman was biased backwards.  
It was in that moment that Loki clasped his fingers around his brother's wrist, pulling him and penetrating the newly opened portal. When Brunhilde looked back at the two, all he saw was Thor's hard stare fading into another dimension.

She cursed loudly, while Rekis reached her to make sure of her condition. At the touch of the doctor, he withdrew with a burst of rage.

"I will not miss what guarantees us to leave this damn place!" She growled between his teeth, gathering the remaining men.  
"Arm yourself properly and go back to the forest! If we find the Beast, we will find them too ".

 

Loki didn’t know where that portal communicated. Ideally, the places were few: either the valley, or the mountain or the forest. The Bubble was not as huge, and the regions were those.

What he didn’t expect was to barely find the ground beneath his feet.

That portal opened exactly on top of the waterfall, in the forest, on the rocks at the apex of the precipice. They slipped badly on the wet ground and Thor ended up in the water, overwhelmed by the rapids.  
Loki tried to get up, moving as quickly as possible, while his brother was thrown on every rock like a crazy ball, unable to find a handle and being sucked into the river's vortices.  
"THOR!" He shouted, stretching a hand on the edge of nothingness. Instinctively he closed it - his eyes on Thor's shape crashing into the waves - finding the ruined fabric of his cloak. The kickback lashed him forward and engaged all his strength in his possession to not to fall with him.  
Thor instinctively raised his arm, managing to catch Loki's wrist with an effort: their wide-eyed gazes had crossed, the breath of both was tremendously short and the terror was painted on their faces.

That situation evoked to both of them a painful memory and they hung on each other for several seconds, in a shaken silence, until Loki gritted his teeth in a groan: the rocks beneath him were pressing painfully on his side and belly, and his grip were tremendously slippery.

"You weight as much as a bloody block of rock!" He snapped, trying to lift him with one hand and find a grip with the other - he felt his body slide towards him, inch by inch.

"Don’t believe you're a feather, you! I drove you for half the snowy land and it was not nice! "Thor spoke, leverage the rocks and then being able to climb.

They rolled to the side, finding some roots of trees and clods of earth and grass, hoisting themselves on the safe ground and breathing for several minutes, until Thor sat up and leaned into Loki's field of vision - the drops of water, slipped from his hair soaked and went to break on the forehead and face of the other.

"Does it always work like that?" He asked ironically, gesturing in the air with his hand.

"More or less. Usually, it’s less spectacular ".

"Don’t do it again. Never".


	14. Fourteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> www.tumblr.com/blog/maximeshepard-beavakarian

"Banner".

Thor had put his hands on, having already avoided two charges. This time it wasn’t the green giant who found them, but they found him: when it was late afternoon, they had seen him wandering more or less in the same place where they had been captured days before, and then follow him to the entrance of a cave, where Hulk had holed up to rest.

Thor was blessing his luck for finding him so simply, but he soon realized that there was something strange about his mate: he didn’t recognize him. So, he attacked them. And in all this, more than out of pride or fear, Loki had refused to come to terms with that green monster, settling on a groove in the rock, just above the entrance to the cave.

"You can forget it" was his answer and "I don’t want anything to do with that… Thing" was the addition to Thor's prayers, to try to calm Banner with the help of his magic and bring him back.

So now Thor had to get away on his own, to inculcate some sense in that dangerous companion, with an expression on his face that did not promise anything good.

In fact Hulk charged for the third time, but this time Thor decided not to dodge and fight him. Loki, for his part, watched the scene between the worried and the annoyed, with his mind fixed on the flow of the time – watching the surrounding woods, in search of Valkyrie and her team.

The plan was to return to Asgard with Hulk, through the passage that Loki had previously used - something would have been invented to avoid drowning Banner in the Asgard Sea. But the plan was for Banner to recognize and not attack them - at least Thor?

As far as Thor was now devoid of Mjolnir, he could not say he was worried about confronting Hulk with his bare hands. On the contrary, he had made his blood boil and warmed his heart, bringing him back to the fury of battle. 

Loki observed the two beating each other with a critical eye: he observed especially his brother and his blind spot and, despite half of his peripheral vision had been lost because of Hela, he was not doing badly at all.

One thing was certain: very few could boast of receiving those terrible shots, from that irrational monster. But Thor's resistance, punished by days of hiding, soon began to fall: Loki had risen in complete calm, betrayed only by his own hands moving in his lap - his only sign that betrayed nervousness - to assess whether to continue to keep aside or not.  
However, that clash was giving him an opportunity to think: managing Hulk was a good thing, but also with his help, could they have the chance to defeat Hela? Could, Banner, make the difference?

It was really a pity to no longer see the power of lightning at every impact, a hallmark of Thor, who knew how to put fear to every enemy with a simple gesture. And in a sense, he felt a bit of sadness for his brother: it was as if someone deny magic to him and those hours without it, were among the most tense and monotonous hours of his life.

 

At least Thor does not lack physical strength - he thought, when his brother brought a hook to Banner's jaw, literally flying him against the rock wall and destroying an eloquent portion of it. Thor turned to his brother, wiping the blood that dripped from his nose with the back of his hand and shaking his head.

"What is it?" Loki had asked.

"We will go on forever, or worse ..." Thor replied, catching his breath. "The only way to make Banner come back is to calm him like Natasha does," he added.

"The spy, do you mean?"

Thor nodded, then turned to Hulk to dodged his charge. The green monster crashed into the rocky wall where Loki watched the fight, exchanging a grim look and a deep growl with the God of Mischief. Loki clenched his fists and conjured his daggers, but Thor took the opportunity to get closer and get Banner's attention.  
He stretched out his hand, exhibiting the most calm and reassuring expression he could show. At that sight, Loki almost choked with his own saliva.

"Hey, big guy ... The sun is getting low".

Thor's voice had become low and soothing, the palm of his hand was open to his friend. He smiled. Hulk stopped short and began to watch him carefully, his eyes wide and his expression confused at times.

"The sun is getting real low…"

Loki raised an eyebrow, but he began to disbelieve his eyes when he saw the Hulk approaching as Thor approached, extending his arm and Hulk mimicking his own movements. The monster appeared calmer.

"I won’t hurt you anymore," added his brother and their hands touched gently. It was working.

However, as Loki made to portray his daggers and Thor performed an unbelievably stupid smile, the magic broke: Hulk took him by the arm and slammed him several times, like a carpet in spring.

At the limits of the hysteria, a liberating and revengeful scream escaped from Loki.

Of all the misadventures in battle, he never digested that treatment on top the Avengers Tower and his pride still hurt, as well as his indignation - he did not know whether to be outraged to himself, to that troglodyte or to his brother, who he had allowed him to treat him like this.

But Loki knew that now he had to intervene. Hulk had literally set Thor in the ground, his fury was mounted to improbable levels and had jumped, ready to rage on his brother still stunned.

He rushed, trying to intercept the beast - Thor would have accused the blow, but at least he would try to entertain him until he recovered - when a spiderweb of lightning rose from Thor’s body, so powerful that it jumps both to the side .

Loki stood up from the dust, shaking his hair from his face with agitation and a crooked smile appeared on his face, seeing Thor get up in a whirl of lightning and both eyes blue-white.

"Now I'm pissed off too, Banner," Thor whispered, throwing himself at full power against his friend. His heart was pumping like an hammer, his whole body screaming and singing: he looked at himself, at his hands, his arms, while Hulk rolled in the dust and got up. Then, he shared a glance with his brother.

"Better later than never!"

And the beaming and confident smile that Thor gave him was something so beautiful that Loki was almost in tears: Thor had become his element. Thor was now the thunderbolt, with no weapons whatsoever, without limits given by a vector.

But as far as Thor had become more powerful than ever before, Hulk had such resistance that he could not be forced out - that was the reality, but Loki could not know that, and Thor had never wanted to believe that Hulk knew no limits. But he was noticing it.

While the battle raged, Loki saw the lights in the distance approach, as he began to hear screams. He climbed again and saw clearly the personal army of Brunhilde, running towards them.

They had found them. That lightning storm must have attracted attention.

"Thor!" He shouted, trying to get over the roar of the battle. His brother turned around - grimace and disappointment painted on his face – following Loki’s arm with his eyes. He cursed.

"Can you keep them busy?" He asked, summoning more power.

Loki nodded, his lips tight and turned to the rest of the forest, seeing Brunhilde ready to run toward them with his drawn swords. A dozen soldiers behind her.

The two looked into each other's eyes. The Valkyrie accelerated her pace, under the sharp and merciless gaze of the God of the Mischief.

He took a deep breath, intertwining his hands behind his back - a green light came slowly to gather all around him. When the woman filled the distance and prepared to hit him, he loosened the pose and immediately a semi-transparent shield, with blue-green shades, closed the three of them in a hemisphere.

With his arms outstretched before him, he prepared to receive the enemies fire. Which arrived, as well as Brunhilde's blows - brutal, fast, powerful.

"Loki?!"

"Don’t distract yourself!" Loki shouted "Take care of the beast and keep it away from me. I can’t move from this position or the barrier will dissolve," he added, returning his gaze to the woman's.

"You will not be able to resist forever," was her comment, picked up by a grimace of ridicule from Loki.

"Let’s make a challenge.”

The dark expression on Loki's face was lit by a tremendous new shock from Thor, who charged Hulk headlong. Seeing that show, the whole crowd fell silent, ceasing the fight. Loki raised his face, still smiling. He turned to look at his brother with an eloquent gesture of the head and then go back to the Valkyrie. For the first time he could read on her face an expression that was not mocking.

"When I told you that it would be better to not piss off my brother, I was telling the truth," Loki asserted calmly. "Withdraw your men and let us do our job".

Brunhilde's gaze lowered for a moment.

"I can’t allow it," she whispered, but this time his manner was different. There was a desperate expression on her face, devoid of resignation and fear.

"You have no choice".

"I will fight for that monster's head and your brother's, it should be the last thing I do!" She exclaimed, beating both her fists on the barrier - which trembled for a moment.

At that point Loki lost his temper.

"You can’t!" He shouted, with all the breath in his throat. From the ranks, Rekis was slowly approaching and startled, stopping to look at him with those big black eyes. Valkyrie had gritted her teeth in a grin of pure rage.

"You can’t stop them. They’re not within your reach. Neither one nor the other "he explained, this time more calmly "And neither me. I understand, money is- "

"No! You do not understand! "She interrupted him, beating her fists again against the barrier. Tears came to his eyes and it was a totally unexpected vision.

"Hildi-" Rekis had put a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her down with his delicate touch, and then bring his eyes into Loki's.

"Loki, we need that money to complete the ship that will take us away from this place, looking for a new planet on which to live ..." she began, but the woman tried in every way to silence her.

"Shut up, Rekis! Do not say another word! "The commander ordered, drawing the blade of the sword against her. In all this, Loki seemed quite confused. The alien found herself forced to use to her powers to appease one of her violent nervous breakdowns.

"We are one step away from leaving the planet! We have designed a ship that will guarantee our survival in space for a long time ... "he added, pressing her hands on Brunhilde's temples and trying to hold her back as best she could.

"We have old people and children, whole families living in the city and we have been working on this project for almost a century! We don’t want to hurt you, but we need this for our survival! "Rekis concluded, as the Valkyrie slumped to the ground and the alien finally gave up.

Loki had remained silent, eyes in those of the healer, lips closed. Surely it would not be difficult to sneak Thor out of another possible detention, but those people had not reckoned with Hulk and his nature. And Asgard needed them.

He took a deep breath, dissolving the barrier but keeping the seidr alive in his hands. The soldiers loaded their rifles, but Rekis gave orders to lower them.

"Loki ... Please" knelt in the dust, tears rolled down her cheeks.

In the silence broken only by the thunder of Thor's lightning and Banner's inhuman screams, Loki turned to his two companions.

"Thor! Try to keep him still! "He shouted to make himself heard, and then approached step by step, under the questioning gaze of his brother and everyone present.

"As if it were simple!"

"I have an idea..." he added, summoning his seidr and slowly turning into Natasha. He came up just enough to get Hulk's attention, while Thor took the opportunity to slip past his back and attack him from behind.

The monster wriggled.

"Hey, big guy ..." he found himself reciting, extending his hand to the beast and trying to be as persuasive as possible. "The sun is getting low ..."

And this time Loki had the right idea. This time, worked.

Under the eyes of everyone present, touching Natasha's hand, Hulk disappeared, leaving a rattling - and naked from head to toe - Banner on the rocky soil, which gasped and turned again and again, before opening his eyes.

"-Nat?" He murmured, his look confused, his voice broken. Around them the questions were raised - Brunhilde and Rekis were leaning against each other with incredulous eyes.  
Thor stood up, reaching the side of his brother, who freed the illusion and resumed his appearance: Banner, if in seeing Thor had mentioned a smile, at that point he allowed himself a look of terror that was priceless.

"Hi, Bruce ..." Loki answered, his voice at once mellifluous and threatening.


	15. Fifteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angst - we have it?

"Aren't you really asking me that, are you?"

Banner was there, covered with a cloth wrapped around his waist, while he waited for someone to retrieve a pair of intact clothes. His eyes were wide open on Thor.

The God of Thunder scratched his beard absently, then raised an eyebrow at his friend's reluctance.

"It's not an impossible thing, for the Hulk," he explained, gesturing with his hands, but Banner looked at him as if he were insulting him.

"Oh sure!" He said, spreading his arms, then immediately returning to the fabric - avoiding another embarrassing figure - "It doesn't matter if I just told you, that I've been a Hulk prisoner for more than two years!"

Thor bit his lower lip, running his hands through his hair.

"What problem do the Avengers have?" Continued the scientist. "Without that damn monster, can't we solve anything? Am I so useless? "

"No, Bruce-"

"Seven PhD’s thrown in the toilet, right? We need brute force! Don’t mind if poor Banner runs the risk of never showing up again! ”He continued, raising his stress levels dangerously, the veins on his neck swelled and a greenish shade began to expand towards his face.

"No, no, no, Bruce!" Thor hastened to calm him, putting both hands on his shoulders. "Bruce. Look at me, "he added, crossing his gaze with the scientist - his breathing which, with difficulty, returned to regular progression.

"I am aware that I am asking you so much. And you are not useless, ”he specified, tightening his grip on his shoulders, in a soothing squeeze. "However, against Hela, we need the Hulk. Even a shrewd mind like Loki has come to this same conclusion ... And if you don't trust me, trust his judgment, "he added with a smile.

"Should I trust your brother?" Banner asked in a low voice. "The one who, by the way, Hulk slammed like a carpet at spring?"

Thor gave a low laugh.

"Believe me ... If Hulk did what he did, it's because Loki allowed it," he pointed out.

Banner stared in disbelief for a few seconds, then sighed loudly, grabbing the clothes one of the guards had just put on him.

"Okay," he replied, pointing his forefinger at him. "But if the Hulk will destroy half city, then don't come and claim it from me. As long as you see me again! "

 

While Rekis took care of Banner’s condition, after that bad adventure that lasted more than two years, Thor, Loki and Brunhilde had gone to the facility's hangar.

The woman was sitting on one of the steel crates not far from the elevator - Thor in front of her, with his arms folded. His brother, instead, had preferred to step aside and observe the situation from a distance, examining the huge spaceship, but straining his ear from time to time.

He knew that Thor wanted to talk to the Valkyrie, but he knew equally well, that talking to that woman was almost impossible.

Thor would ask for her help. He would have asked for the help of those people, who until recently had been their jailer, in exchange for something indispensable to them.  
But how would she take that request?

 

"I'm not going back to Asgard" was her reply, lapidary. Thor narrowed his eyes, letting out a deep sigh. He leaned against the nearby box, crossing his arms and lowering his chin to his chest.

"Why not?" He added, spreading his arms.

"Because". Brunhilde emphasized that answer with a glance of fire and a dry gesture of the hand. After only five minutes, they were stalled.

"Brunhilde ... It’s your best option. And Asgard is one step away from here, according to Heimdall's indications. Do you prefer to wander aimlessly through the universe, in order to keep your pride and your stubbornness intact? "

The woman, at those words, put the bottle down with a dry gesture on the metal. She was ready to face Thor.

"Pride?!" she raised so much the tone of voice that all those present, working to prepare the ship, turned - Loki looked up at the sky and interrupted what he was doing, approaching the two.

"Do you, at least, know what you're talking about?"

"Treason, Brunhilde. The military code of Asgard is clear! "Thor replied, approaching her in all his imposingness.

The woman allowed herself a contemptuous laugh, then pressed: "Oh, we did our homework, bravo! As far as I'm concerned, you can stick your military code up your ass! " she said, slapping him on the arm and pushing him backwards.

Thor ran a hand over his face nervously, rubbing his face and biting his tongue. It was at that moment that Loki approached, resting both hands on his shoulders.

"Brother," he began, as Thor turned to look at him and the woman took a step back. "You must know that Odin sent them to die. It’s understandable that she doesn’t want to return to Asgard, still to fight Hela again ".

"I understand, Loki, but we need all the help we can get against our sister. And I don’t intend to consider myself responsible for our Father's actions, "replied his brother, bringing back the long blond locks in a dry gesture. "We must take back Asgard, it is our - her - people! " he pointed to the Valkyrie "And the integrity of the Nine Realms. Now that our Father is dead- "

"Odin is dead?" Interrupted Brunhilde, leaning her hand on his arm to make him turn. Both brothers nodded silently. The woman's face seemed to lighten at the news, but she quickly recovered her usual contemptuous expression.

"This changes things ..." she added, however, crossing her arms "But I will not send my people to die against Hela" she continued firmly. Thor exchanged an intense look, before he spoke again.

"Our people are dying. Brunhilde ... Heimdall and Sif are fighting Hela's legion on their own, to try to protect the population. There are children, whole families hidden in the mountain. It is only a matter of time before Hela finds them - indeed, they may already be dead, as far as I know. "

"This does not change the fact, that I will not make my people die to save yours."

Stall. Loki clenched his jaw a couple of times.

"We will not send them to Hela. We won't even send you, if you don't want to, "he explained, gesturing with his hands." But your people know how to fight and are well equipped. And they trust their commander, "he added, tilting his head in an eloquent gesture.

"Once the population is rescued on this spaceship, Thor and I will be free to fight Hela-"

"You can't know this, Loki!" She interrupted him.

Loki pursed his lips, lowering his arms.

"She's a monster! She is -"

Brunhilde clenched her fists, then hit the pile of crates nearby with her left hand, with extreme irritation. She lowered her head, gritting her teeth - the words died in her throat. The memories of that tragedy were still alive, of her companions, literally slain by a single entity.

Thor approached her, resting his hand on her shoulder. Brunhilde slowly raised her face - her eyes wet. She didn't dodge him.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, limping down his grip. He looked at her sincerely, apologizing in silence for the outburst of a little earlier, regarding the treason.

"I'm offering you the chance to avenge them" he continued "And, I swear to you on whatever you want, I'll make sure to kill Hela with my own hands".

 

Loki glanced at his brother, remaining silent - a strange feeling in him, seeing Thor so hard and determined. A shudder ran through his body, bringing his mind to Thanos ... And to what Thor and anyone around him, were unaware of.

How, perhaps, all that work could be useless.

He took a couple of steps back, looking down. A dizziness undermined his balance and, suddenly, his heart started beating wildly. He inhaled sharply from his nose, trying to hide the terrible sensation in the most discreet way possible.

Brunhilde, after a long silence, placed his hand on Thor's: her face was crossed by a tense expression - it was clear that she was terrified, but it was equally clear that Thor and Loki's proposal had a certain weight.

"You know that if you get killed, this will be the end, right?"

Thor smiled bitterly.

"I know," he admitted, "but she will have to work hard, to do it."

The Valkyrie gave him a grin, then grabbed the bottle again. She spun the liquid inside a couple of times, then drank the entire contents, all in one breath. Thor raised an eyebrow.

"Help me to evacuate the Bubble."

Those words had the effect of lifting a boulder from the chest. They gave each other a powerful squeeze - Thor's smile coming from ear to ear. He turned to Loki, but his brother was like disappeared from the hangar.

 

The spaceship had to travel thirty-six hours of space flight to reach the wormhole designated by Heimdall in the vision Thor had in his cell, but after the first twelve hours of windows on the cosmic void, Loki showed signs of restlessness.

Thor had found him several times to fix that emptiness, knowing well what that image evoked to his brother, but he had always tried to conceal the tension in some way, to avoid overloading him with unnecessary anxieties.

However, Loki could not get out of his mind that terrible moment and all that had come from that.

 

He found him, late in the evening in the cabin they had chosen to share for that short trip, standing in front of the large window. At that moment, Thor, cursed that unwise choice.  
He had tried to talk to his brother, but Loki was closed in a nervous silence and little by little, from a broken speech they had passed to the quarrel. And Thor no longer knew how find a civil way of dealing with his brother. He was about to give up, when something in Loki's behavior made him sound an alarm.

It will have been his way of gesturing with his hands - unconscious - it will have been his look that betrayed something that vaguely resembled fear...

The fact was that Thor decided to go all the way.

 

"Loki ... What are you hiding from me?" He asked, making him turn - his hands on his shoulders. And if Loki was restless that evening, Thor was running out of patience.

Finding his brother so close to him, with that question, caught Loki off guard. In hindsight, he realized that he had thrown several signals all at once and even someone like Thor, would have been able to receive them, somehow.

But Loki's mind, sometimes was his enemy number one.

He clasped his hands to loosen that grip, but Thor's arms did not move an inch. He snorted annoyed, raising his eyes to the sky.

"Would you leave me alone?"

Loki was tired and finding Thor like a mountain, blocking his way and taking away his air, it started to turn out too much.

"Why don’t you get out of here?!" he had exclaimed.

"Not until you decide to talk!" The other retorted, planting his hands firmly against the glass and trapping him between the window and himself. Almost a hysteria came up to Loki.

"Thor, I swear to you that if you don't get out of me now, I'll punch you."

"Listen to me ..." Thor had said "I know the open space does not evoke good memories. But I'm here ... "he went on, softening the tone and leaving some space, so Loki could stand upright and not in an uncomfortable position.

"We are together. And we're returning to Asgard. You have something that haunts you, Loki, I'm not blind- "

"Ah, no?" This came out more contemptuous than he wanted. And Loki realized the redundancy of that feeling: that resentment towards his brother, that worm that continued to gnaw him, although he tried in every way to go further. But that resentment, that constant brooding, was part of a redundant obsession, impossible to control.

"Loki ..."

"Please, move," he added dryly.

Thor then let go and stepped back, sighing loudly and put his hands through his hair. He made a half turn on himself, then turned back to his brother.

"Remember what we said in Norway." He pointed his index finger at him, pointing out that they could not really be returned to the usual dynamics of recent years.

"I don't know how to read you, okay? I can be an open book for you, but for me, most of the time you are something unknown. And it's frustrating, Loki, seeing you like that and not have the power to do anything "Thor continued, gesturing wildly with his hands, while Loki looked at the floor and bit his lip.

Loki was tired. Loki was terribly tired.

"You're the only person in this damn universe, who can make me feel useless!" Thor said, spreading his arms and shoulders sinking. Their eyes met for a moment and for a moment Loki seemed to dissolve that wall of silence behind which he had fled, but lasted the time of the beating of wings.

"I don't want to talking about it, Thor. Leave me alone, please”he whispered, turning his back to him, but his brother was quicker and took him decisively by the wrist. If Thor hadn't known his brother for so long, he would have let go by the chilling look that Loki gave him immediately afterwards.

“Thor, damn you-!"

"Stop running away Loki, by the Norns!"

"It's my business. Leave me! ” He shouted, trying to untie his grip with his right hand, but in vain. He jerked several times, but the only result he got was to hurt himself.

But the physical pain was nothing compared to the question and the words that Thor pronounced a few seconds later.

"Does it have to do with the Bifrost? With the Chitauri and you only know what? ”Thor had thundered, tightening his grip and blocking the digital door lock.

Loki looked up sharply into his brother's, his face tense and his teeth clenched. His heart began to pump hard, a sense of fear shocked his body and he trembled. He trembled at the thought of what Thor could ask him. How close Thor was to that question.

"I saw your eyes as you look beyond the glass, Loki! I saw you fall into the void, I saw you release your grip! ”And Thor's tone, like his grip, was gradually increasing.

"I cried for days, weeks, months! I cursed myself for being saved by our Father and not having fallen with you, because I was also on that damn bridge and I was fighting against you! I am who destroyed the Bifrost! "

And it was at that moment that Loki's throat closed, leaving him breathless. His chest froze, unable to breathe and his mind began to travel at an impressive speed towards the abyss.

"What the hell happened between your fall from Bifrost and your coming to New York, to change you so much?! What the hell happened to you, Loki! "

 

In an abrupt gesture, almost as he had done towards Brunhilde, and instinctive, Loki put his hand on Thor's forehead and opened his mental connection with him. They hadn't done this for centuries and Thor was completely overwhelmed.

"Do you really want to know ?! You want? YOU WANT IT! ”He raised his tone to scream, clenching his fingers in his brother's flesh, with such force that it really hurt. He was out of control. Loki could not look himself in a mirror now, but he looked like the time when Thanos found him and had fun playing with his mind.

His eyes wandered restlessly, with a sinister light - the expression contrite in a chilling grimace - on the face of his brother, who was convulsively shaken by his power, until he fell to the ground several minutes later.

At Thor's thud, Loki withdrew his hand, fumbling in his own impetus.

When Thor opened his eye, struggling to make the air flow back into his lungs, he felt as if he had been skinned alive: every fiber in his body screamed, every muscle ached. His mind galloped at bumpy speed and his sight was pitch black. And in that black, the only images he could see were those of his brother tortured to death, lying on a dirty floor, in chains.

The slim figure in front of him, who, with a simple gesture of his hand, made him contort with pain. And a silhouette behind him, sitting with his hands in his lap, enjoying the scene.

Loki, covered with wounds, blood encrusted all over his body. The tears that ran down his dirty cheeks, his heartbreaking screams, his continual asking for mercy.

The words used to break him, to destroy him. And his eyes clear, again, red, wet, terrified like he had never been able to see in his life. The fear and terror of the condemned.  
Thor saw in those eyes how Loki had felt. He was swept away by that immense solitude that made his brother a slave, by the immense pain of feeling abandoned, by the renunciation of the possibility of being saved. From the desire to die rather than continue that tremendous torture.

Thor was overwhelmed by the deep disgust Loki felt for himself, after days and days of agony and despair. And then he felt the hatred, the anger, but he also heard the screams of that child who was suffocated, he was pushed lower and lower into the abyss, but he never stopped crying and asking for help.

Those screams that changed, to become the cries of his little newborn brother, when Thor, a little older than him, approached and tried to make him stop crying, covering him with delicate kisses.

But those screams still changed, becoming deafening and distorting in his while. He put his hands to his ears, under the shocked look of Loki, who had been unable to move and was terrified by the gesture he had just made.

 

"Brother ..." Loki murmured, bending and doing to place his hand on Thor's shoulder, but he hit it, throwing Loki’s hand to the side and raising his face towards him - his eyes wide and furious.

Loki saw a light he didn't like, on his brother's face and backed off instinctively, almost terrified of the figure of Thor, groping himself up and trying to recover his standing position.

All of a sudden, he found himself hitting his back against the metal wall - a sharp and painful thud - with Thor's hands gripping his dress collar and his face a few inches.

"How ..." he took a breath, swallowing hard. Loki looked at him frightened, out of breath, realizing that he had actually established a mental connection with his brother, without filters.

"How could you" and Thor's gaze turned from furious to devastated "Hide me all ... This". The last word came to him strangled by a groan.

 

Both were upset. Loki opened his lips to reply, but could not utter a word.

Then another push: Loki's back impacted the wall again and Thor moved away from him, distancing himself. He put his hands to his temples - the pain was such that it broke him in half.

"Thor, sit down-"

"DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH?!" was his reply, shouted at the top of his voice. Loki's chest was shaken, he put his arms forward, but Thor backed away, extremely confused and disoriented. His hands trembled, his eye showed disbelief mixed with pain. But there was a different shade in that blue.

Thor was afraid. Real fear.

Thor now knew who Thanos was and knew that Loki had failed. He knew what fate would await him, if Thanos had discovered him alive.

 

"I-I don't hate you-"

He tried to stop his brother, to explain himself. But Thor had already disappeared beyond the bathroom door. His arms fell down his hips, as tears on his cheeks. He bowed his head in a gesture of resignation, while his heart was bleeding profusely.  
Why were they only able to hurt each other?

 

He did not believe that that day would be the day he would hit the bottom. Never, again, did he expect such revelations from Loki and guilt was devouring him from the inside at a merciless speed.

He trembled. His hands, his arms trembled as if the temperature around him had dropped to unlivable levels: he raised his face in the direction of the mirror and, seeing his reflection, a retching strained his control, while he could not stop the tears.

No, he didn't believe that any of Loki's words could reduce him that way. He was ready for any form of insult on his part, he was used to being pushed away, playing that tug-of-war that was going on for years. He was used to his pissed-off glances, to the poison of his tongue, to his stabs - concrete or abstract - to the apparent senselessness of his actions, his betrayals, his wickedness, his lies.

But not to the truth. Not those bloody images, those images of Loki in chains, bleeding, suffering. Terrified. Surrendered. He had always considered him his weaker brother, but now he recognized that he had the wrong judgment: Loki was still able to live after all he had been through - and he was sure his brother had only shown him the tip of the iceberg of all Thanos and his Sons had given him.

How had Loki got up? How did he endure in silence, hiding all that stuff in his heart?

How did he endure all this without giving into the need to talk about it with him? Him, who was his brother, who had shared fifteen hundred years of life: really Loki had such a distrust in him that he refused to ask him for help and risk being brutally killed by that madman?

He brought his eyes back to his reflection: how much pain did Loki have to endure because his brother was not worthy of his trust? Loki who had always seen Thor his hero, since they were little, who looked at him with wide eyes when he taught him things and finally managed to do them. Who looked at him with sad eyes when he could not sleep and then Thor told him the heroic deeds of his ancestors, until his heart subsided and his body did not surrender to sleep, clinging to him. Loki who ran to meet him, when he returned from his first trip with their Father, tears down his cheeks, shouting that he never wanted to be so long without him.

Where did they go? How much had Thor lost?

 

He ran his hands through his hair, pulling them down. Things hadn't started to crumble a little less than ten years ago. No. The mirror had begun to crack much earlier, but he had been so blind that he didn't notice.

As usual. And now he found himself throwing down the bitter pill of the knowledge that Loki was right. Largely. Even though his brother no longer trusted him, Thor only now realized that he really should have insisted. He would have to take him even by force, it didn't matter, he should have listen his heart rather than his pride.

He should have insisted, even at the cost of driving Loki away from him even more. But now the only voice he could hear was his mind, screaming his failure. Both as a person and as an older brother. Whether as a future King of Asgard.

And he was so upset that, in that reflected image, he could not even see self-pity. All of that image caused him nausea, rejection. Horror. Thor was really beyond guilt.

 

He clenched his long hair behind his neck in his left fist.

His reflection was replaced by the desperate expression of a Loki at the limit of survival, alone and forgotten by all, while Thanos gave the order to rape his already precarious mind. And he couldn't help feeling complicit.

Where is the Tesseract? This was what he had asked as soon as he discovered that his brother was alive.

I'm not here to share the pain with you. This was what he had told him when for the first time, after a long time, he had come down to meet a Loki obviously destroyed by the news of the death of their dear Mother, in prison.

No, Loki's stab wounds and turnarounds were nothing compared to this.

 

He took the dagger from the leg.

Loki's voice came faintly from outside the bathroom door.

"Brother ..." he had said, putting his hands and forehead against the door. He received no reply. He narrowed his eyes, then wiped his face.

"Please, get out of there" he added, but it was useless. He decided to press the button and enter, not caring if Thor wanted company or not.

But when the sliding door slid into the metal wall, Loki's eyes widened to capacity, his breath caught in his throat.

Thor held his hair, cut cleanly, in his left hand. He barely turned, while Loki put his hands to his mouth.

 

"Thor-"

The dagger continued to cut, as if to tear off the rest of the lengths that had survived the first incision. With his gaze fixed on the mirror, his jaw gradually closing, Thor cut every lock clearly, making him more and more determined and cruel.

"Why? Your hair- "Loki had asked between the jerks of his chest, but Thor didn't want to talk. Thor wanted to take off the symbol of off that he didn't deserve. He didn't deserve.

_I don't deserve him._

Blood trickled into the left ear. Loki moved.

_I don't deserve him._

"Thor, that's enough!"

_I don't deserve him!_

"THOR-"

_No._

"I DON’T DESERVE YOU, LOKI!"

"THOR STOP!" Loki shouted, taking the knife from his hands and throwing it on the bathroom floor. On other occasions, probably Loki would have slapped him in the face or despised him. Now, instead, he stood a few inches from him, with that terrified and confused expression, his hands trembling and his breath short.

Thor took a couple of steps backwards, leaning against the bathroom wall and letting himself slip to the floor. Loki knelt beside him immediately.

There was silence for a very long minute, broken only by their heavy breathing. He then felt Loki's hand lean on his forearm and his knee pushed against his thigh.

He raised his face. Two silent tears fell down his bloodstained cheeks.

"I do not-"

"No," Loki silenced him, taking his right hand between his and squeezing vigorously to keep him from shaking. Thor let out a gasp, exhaling a long, rambling breath.

"Thor ... I'll manage," Loki whispered, coming closer to him and pulling him by his left shoulder, so that he had to look him in the eye.

His brother raised his face, shaking his head vigorously.

"No."

"I've always managed, I'll solve it. Trust me- “but Thor's arms went to hold him so tight, that he had to stop talking to trying to catch his breath.

"I don't want that to happen. I'll never leave you alone, Loki. Never again. Never again!".

The feeling in his chest was so overwhelming, he had to catch his breath again and again to continue the conversation. Loki felt his brother's hand go up, leaning back against his neck, finding himself literally in his arms - his face in the crook of his brother's neck.

"I will defend you even at the cost of my life," Thor murmured, as Loki stared convulsively at those words, fighting sobs.

"Burn the throne of Asgard, burn the entire Universe," Thor urged, stroking the wavy and black locks, sinking his hand in with vigor.

"I can't lose you again. Not again, because of me! "

"Thor-"

He let out a roar, then took Loki's face in his hands.

"I won't leave you, okay?"

Crossing his eye with those eyes full of conflicting emotions, broke his already wounded heart. Loki sniffed, leaning his forehead against his brother's and letting more than one sob escape.

"Here I am. I will fight him. We will fight him together. Ok? "

He stroked his cheeks, while Loki completely abandoned himself in that tumult of emotions that Thor's gestures and words had stirred.

"Ok?!" Thor added, shaking him vigorously.

"Ok ... Ok - yes" he nodded his head several times, almost to convince himself of that unexpected epilogue, then he put his arms around and hugged him. In response, Thor began to kiss him first on his forehead, then on his cheeks, rubbing his bristly beard against that silky smooth skin, gradually climbing back to his temple and stopping there.  
They didn't know how much time passed on that metal floor, cold as ice. Minutes could have passed, like hours, tightened together, gradually regularizing the breaths, clasping the hands, the shoulders, to reassure each other.

It was Thor who first broke the silence.

"Now let's go and bring Asgard back," he murmured, leaving a last kiss almost on the corner of Loki's lips, which slowly looked up, wiping his still-damp cheeks with the back of his hand.

"Not so fast."

Thor gave him a questioning look.

Loki smiled faintly, passing his right hand between the ruined tufts and the still-bright red blood that dripped here and there. Thor had mortified himself beyond measure - he knew how important his hair was to him and in seeing that raptus against himself, he had feared he would do much more serious things.

“Let me fix this disaster ... You are unwatchable."


	16. Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Al little bit of contact... A little bit of warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive, guys...  
> I apologize, I delayed so much in publishing this chapter, but, to quote Black Mirror - Bandersnatch, I fell into the "hole". And the main reason was Endgame - the expectation of the film, its vision, my reflections on the film. All this, combined with some health problems, made my inspiration evaporate.  
> But we are almost at the end of the story, the inspiration is back and I promise not to stumble anymore on my own feet xD
> 
> Enjoy! ^^

He had only to touch the wounds, to heal them with extreme simplicity. And he had also proposed to Thor to give him back his former appearance - those wonderful long blond wisps - but his brother had gently squeezed his hand and brought it to his heart.

"No" he had simply exhaled, almost in a whisper, looking at him with that one eye, almost veiled in tears. Loki pursed his lips and looked down, unable to sustain the blue whirlwind of emotion.

Although he had tried to make fun of the situation in his own way, they both felt like they had come from a great and bloody battle. Both were destroyed, both in body and spirit - Thor felt broken, Loki felt a pounding headache, which gave him no respite for more than an hour now.

"Let me see that," he pointed to, later on, the eye socket devastated by that terrible scar. Thor leaned forward slightly - his legs dangling down from the desk on which he had sat to be treated - retreating as soon as Loki put his fingers down.

"Does it hurt so much?" He asked, surprised.

"A bit'…"

"A bit’," Loki emphasized the obvious, with a raised eyebrow, earning a faint laugh from his brother. "I will not die for this" he quoted his own words, to which Loki rolled his eyes and blocked his face at the level of his chin, examining the wound.

When the green light ran out, Thor put his arm around his waist, hugging him and hiding his face in the hollow of her neck: Loki could not help but bring his hands to the base of his brother's neck, toying with those short locks for a few moments and feeling a dull pain at the bottom of his heart.

"Thank you" muttered Thor in the now-ragged fabric of Loki's dress, who smiled, looking at him from above and let himself go in a long sigh, massaging the back of Thor's neck gently.  
"Shall we get some rest?"

 

Thor woke up with his face sunk in those raven curls, ruffled by the events he had just lived and by four, five hours of sleep, just passed. He clearly remembered falling asleep next to him, resting his hand on his, in a warm and reassuring contact.

They had not returned to the subject, except to postpone the matter bitterly, due to matters of force majeure. They simply needed to rest, stop for a moment and breathe. Everything else could wait.

In that brief sleep he had not dreamed, but probably had moved several times and clung to his brother, absorbing him in that sure embrace, searching for a shred of serenity in the heat of his body. And from that gesture, Loki had not escaped: he had woken up, feeling Thor's body over his - how could he not notice it? He had turned slightly to look at him, passing the back of his hand over his forehead, imperceptibly and counting his breaths, to see if he was awake or asleep.

He then curled up in that embrace, literally making himself overwhelmed. A long sigh, his fingers intertwined with those of Thor's free hand, which had gone to lean against his chest - to hold him tightly.

He took a deep breath in those soft tufts, feeling Loki move beneath him and touch his hand on his chest and push his head back a little, as if he were looking for more contact. Then he felt him motionless, except for the index finger of his left hand that slid up and down the back of his hand.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

Those whispered words seemed deafening to Loki's ears. He opened his eyes, shiny regardless, looking at the wall of that gray, aseptic room and then moving his gaze to outer space and its darkness.

"Because you wouldn't have listened to me" he whispered in reply to his brother's question. Thor breathed in his nose, shaking his head.

"You had to force me to do it. At the risk of hurting me ".

Loki turned slowly in his embrace and aimed those wonderful green eyes straight into Thor's - a serious and determined look, but also desperate.

"That's why I kept silent," he replied, resting his forehead on his brother's chin. He allowed himself another long and silent sigh, and then added, "I didn't want anyone else involved, especially you. Asgard and all the rest ".

He felt Thor's hand resting on his head and smiled bitterly.

"I don't even know what I tried to do, to avoid the implications of New York and Odin... I escaped everything, as usual. I just wanted to disappear. " His fingernails lightly scratched his chest, leaving faint reddish marks. As difficult as dealing with that subject, the warmth of that embrace was such as to soothe that restlessness in him that is always so alive and inexorable.

He felt Thor's lips resting on his forehead and closed his eyes.

"I’m with you, brother" he whispered, rubbing his lips lightly at the base of her hairline. Loki slowly lifted his face and their eyes met: Thor saw the terror in his eyes and the image of his vulnerable brother, broke his heart.

At that moment, Loki, had lowered all defenses. There were no lies, no masks, no armor to hide weak spots. He was there, in all his despair, with that face leaning towards him, looking for a hold.

That look, it reminded him of that time, hanging on Gungnir, on the abyss, while Odin held firmly the ankle of his firstborn.

He found himself wanting those lips with all of himself and that thought hit him deeply. He found himself wanting to hold his brother so strong, almost to incorporate him inside himself and to live by his essence, to conceal him from the universe, to protect him from everything, person, destiny.

"He will kill you, Thor ..."

Loki's voice trembled. Thor's hand went up his cheek and his thumb stopped at the corner of his mouth, caressing his lips gently, while the blue of that eye became shiny, but at the same time full of determination.

"Don't you trust my abilities ...?" Thor whispered back, looking down at those thin lips and slowly approaching. Loki looked at him in confusion and despair, but shortened the distance between them even further.

"I know the Mad Titan and I know what he's capable of," he replied, brushing the tip of his nose against his brother's cheek. His breathing grew heavier, his heartbeat accelerated.

"He must not touch you. Never again".

Thor's fingers went to rest firmly on his jaw, raising his chin and bringing it towards him and Loki did not offer resistance. He closed his eyes, almost in apnea.

In the exact instant in which their lips touched, three rapid blows to the closed door of their room made them start.

It was Brunhilde.

 

Loki looked at himself in the mirror, absently passing his fingers over the leather of that dress, found in the closet of the adjoining room: it wasn't exactly his taste, but it was better than the ragged dress he had been wearing for too long. At least the colors were acceptable and would have had no distractions to maintain a decent glamor with magic.   
He had finally taken a shower, after Thor had preceded him to join the others in the ship's control room. He had taken his time, spending several minutes untangling the black curls, rubbing his shoulder, washing and rewashing several times, to take off not only the dirt of those days, but also the horrible thoughts.

He then remained motionless under the warm water, his eyes closed, his back leaning against the metal wall. A hand went slowly towards his face, the index touched his lips and he thought back to what had happened just before.

His hand trembled, along with his chest: he opened his eyes, heedless of the water. Thor's breath on his lips, his hand tight around his jaw, his beard tickling his face.

He found himself wanting that opportunity denied, he found himself craving it with all of himself and that, as much as it terrified him, didn't surprise him. Not at all.

And now, in front of that mirror, he found himself staring at his thoughtful expression, carefully trimming his hair, trying to understand why his heart felt so light and so heavy, all of a sudden.

He had confessed to Thor all that had happened. Thor had seen through his mind and now he knew. As much as Loki had tried to solve that situation himself, he had to admit that confessing it to his brother was like taking a boulder off his chest.

... Although now Thor had become a target as much as he was.

The last words exchanged between them, concerned the promise to talk about it properly after the fight against Hela, after Asgard had been reconquered, after ... If there had been, an after.

Speak. Thanos's was just the most urgent question, the first voice in that long list of things left unsaid between them.

He sighed for a long time, bringing his eyes firmly back to his reflection: he should have made a choice, sooner or later. And perhaps breaking a promise, he added mentally, smiling bitterly at the irony of fate.

 

_When his eyes became accustomed to the intense light, he could not help noticing with horror the little bodies at his feet, helpless, in a pool of blood. A little farther on, on what looked like the throne of Asgard, almost completely destroyed, except for part of the seat, Volstagg lay sprawled on the stone. He looked at him with death in his eyes and in his heart._

_A stream of blood slipped from his lips when he called his girls and they didn't answer. His eyes, now extinct, rested on Thor: there was resignation, fear and pain._

_And a silent accusation. He said nothing, exhaling his last breath, but his gaze turned to an indeterminate point behind Thor, before the doors of the hall crumbled and Surtur presented himself with his bulk and Muspelheim's fire all around him - the magma that, inexorably, penetrated the foundations of the building. He felt that unbearable heat burn his skin. And again the intense light._

He jerked awake, feeling a hand on his chest. Loki's hand. Thor sat up - his heart in his throat - as his brother watched him worriedly and apologized for making him flinch that way.

Thor shook his head, resting his hand on his forearm.

"It's not your fault, I was dreaming," he murmured, then rubbed his left hand over his face and his eyes. He tried to pull back his hair, but that gesture failed, bringing the mind back to that precise reality.

Loki pursed his lips, sitting next to him: his hand went up to Thor's chin, making him turn towards him. He stroked his cheek gently with his thumb.

"We must prepare ourselves. One hour left to the wormhole, the engines are progressively accelerating, "Loki explained, measuring the tone so Thor was able to caught his breath and calm down.

Thor lightly shook his head in a gesture of assent, lowering his eye, but Loki's hand did not allow him to lower his face too: he came into contact with his gaze, with a questioning expression.

"I'm with you, brother" was Loki's reply, piercing him with those green eyes like emeralds. The expression on Loki's face was one of determination, but he also betrayed apprehension.

Thor smiled faintly, bringing his brother's wrist to his lips and leaving a light kiss on the inside.

 

\- _Two minutes to the contact_ \- the voice of the autopilot echoed.

Thor looked at Loki beside him, who nodded briefly. His eye then shifted in the direction of Brunhilde, able to place the heavenly sword in the sheath hanging from his belt.

"You can still change your mind," he commented, but the Valkyrie beckoned to silence. Her eyes watched the reddish black immensity of the galactic portal.  
"No" she whispered, and then she cleared his throat "That's right. Loki knows the area where Heimdall has found refuge, like his pockets. I'll go down on the Bifrost, with you and Banner ".

Thor looked ahead, smiling proudly. Brunhilde would have fought by his side.

"Once we enter Asgard's system, I will take the manual command of the ship and you will drop off with the shuttle. We will be right behind you ”Loki said, then turned to Rekis.  
"We will proceed on the opposite side of the Bifrost, raising the concealment system and will land near the base of the mountain. Once the inhabitants are safe, you will run away with the ship and remain in orbit. I will join Thor as soon as possible, "he concluded, resting his hands on the back of the command chair. Rekis nodded and so did Brunhilde's men.

\- _Twenty seconds._ -

They took their seats, fastened the seat belts.

\- _Ten seconds._ -

Loki turned slightly towards Thor and laid his hand on his brother's, sitting next to him. Thor laced his fingers with his.

\- _Five._ -

"We will avenge them ..." Loki whispered.

Thor sniffed sharply, nodding with conviction. He clenched his jaw.

\- _Three._ -

"Don't die, Thor".

\- _Two._ -

Thor grinned.

"Neither you".

\- _One._ -


	17. Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Are you a mage? Be a mage. (semicit)

When Loki descended from the airship along with Rekis and a large group of soldiers, Heimdall emerged from the loophole at the top of the long stairway leading into the heart of the mountain.

He gave precise instructions to the new companions, then activated one of the knot and manifest himself just before the Guardian. All the countless people gathered in that room turned surprised - just an indistinct murmur in the air, before the silence fell.

Loki smiled imperceptibly - a nod of greeting.

"I saw you coming," said Hemdall, putting his weight on the two-handed sword, pointed at the ground. Loki passed him with measured steps, looking around.

"Of course," he commented ironically, then ran his hands through the base of his hair and called his seidr: as his fingers passed, the golden helmet began to take shape, in an elegant sparkle.

When he opened his eyes to those of the people of Asgard, he saw a few smiles of hope between looks of suspicion. They were more than frightened: there were very few adult men, mostly those refugees represented women, young people and children. Very few elders.

Loki pursed his lips in a grimace.

"They fought with honor," the Guardian whispered, reaching the Prince of Asgard at his side.

"It is a miracle that so many people have remained alive. You and Sif have done a great job. The royal guard? "

"Few have been saved. They are with her. Hela is coming here ".

Loki took a deep breath, pushing his way through the crowd. A girl of about fourteen escaped from her mother, running to meet him and clinging to his waist.

"Help us."

Loki's heart tightened and a knot formed in the back of his throat. For a few moments he remained as if struck, as if petrified, almost unable to process that gesture, under the wide eyes of the crowd. Then he gently placed his hand on the girl's head, stroking her hair. He felt her tremble under his fingers.

He pulled her chin up, wiping her tears. Those light eyes were full of terror and despair of those who saw things they should not see. He did not linger in a smile or blatant gestures, but spoke words that he never imagined himself uttering.

"I'm here. We are here. And we will take you away from here ”he replied with all the possible volume that that lump in his throat could afford. "Heimdall, proceed with the evacuation. Nobody will pass by that door ”.

 

Thor was sitting on the throne - Gungnir clutched in his hand. He was sitting on the glittering and golden throne of Asgard, after having climbed over the rubble of the wide vaults, scattered in the upper part of the central nave, after crossing the empty and silent corridor, the colonnades, climbed the great staircase that gave access to the throne room . Everything was the same as he had seen it days ago - except for the ceiling, but at the same time, everything seemed different.

Hela's cumbersome presence shone from the atmosphere, although there was no trace of the woman. The disquieting silence in which Asgard had sunk, was something he could shudder as well.

The only soul they had met when they landed on the Bifrost was a huge wolf-shaped beast. His dark, charcoal gray fur made his green irises surrounded by red, stand out: Banner had found his enemy, for the moment, and Brunhilde had covered his king as he swiftly filed for the palace - lightning between his fingers , his furious gaze, Father's spear in his hands.

He was ready to face Hela. The rage of thunder was now on his side - and not just that. The anger of all those who had suffered the consequences of Hela, followed him like a smoky shadow.

But when he arrived in the throne room, he found himself alone, staring at the rubble on the ground, at first, then at the ceiling, which showed frescoes quite different from what he remembered.

He had stopped, nose up, the heart that increased his heartbeat when he saw the depictions of Odin visibly younger and Hela, with Mjolnir raised to the sky, as a sign of victory.  
He felt nauseated: the mere idea that his hammer had belonged, at first, to that monster - that this monster was something different, once ... Thor could not make up his mind, he could not think clearly: it was like if he had sunk into a spiral of mud. Everything was black, smoky, dark.

He clenched his jaw vigorously, his eyes on Asgard's throne.

What had he done, Odin?

With that thought, he had sat down on the cold throne, caressing the sculpted armrests and smoothing, slowly. That visibly dated fresco could mean anything and nothing. It could have been a deception of Hela. However, he could not get the probability out of his mind that his father had put his hand to the truth again.

He slammed Gungnir's base three times on the ground: his powerful blows echoed throughout Asgard - as Allfather used to do in calling attention. Sitting on the throne, his left hand tightening the ornaments, his tumultuous gaze, fixed on the wide entrance door. The drawn face.

She would have come to him. He was sure of it.

 

The two heavy doors that kept the mountain lair sealed, vibrated softly. It was heard like a metallic noise before they were completely ripped out.  
Sif had returned just in time with some of the recovered people and the survivors of the royal guard: he was doing his utmost with Heimdall to speed up the evacuation of that cave, while Loki remained standing, in front of the still intact entrance.

His hands were surrounded by a bright green aura, his eyes closed. Sif had exchanged a glance with the Guardian, while she was holding two children and accompanied the women to the first steps, to the outside.

When the doors were thrown to the ground, they had not yet completed the evacuation and were terrified at the sight of Hela and her terrifying army behind her.  
Both she and Heimdall drew their swords. Loki opened his eyes, meeting his gaze with his sister, who smiled with satisfaction.

"Look who has come home ..." he said smoothly, leaning one foot after the other on the catwalk he had created. One step, two. One third.

The fourth did not.

All around Gungnir's three strokes began to echo. Hela turned in the direction of the royal palace with a surprised look and when she brought attention to the figure of Loki, she saw him smiling seraphic.

"Exactly" was his dry reply "I'm afraid someone's looking for you, Sister".

Loki hoped with all his heart they would not arrive at what happened soon after: he hoped that Hela would concentrate his only interest in Thor, that he would lose his absurd hunting for the Asgardians who had managed to take refuge in the cave, to escape the despair that Sif and Heimdall had described to him shortly before.

But Hela ... Hela was a predictable but inexorable entity.

She didn't say a word. She simply raised his hand, before turning her back and heading towards Thor. She gave an order with a nod.

The army of undead began to march on the catwalk, dark as a moonless night. A black and green coat, with a grotesque appearance.

"Loki!" Sif shouted behind him, before a green light exploded in the shadows of that safe haven. A barrier rose in front of all of them - Loki's arms stretched forward. He gritted his teeth as the army clashed against the invisible wall.

Loki really hoped to be strong enough to withstand that unknown fury.

He hoped to be enough for Asgard, this time.

 

Loki's grunts echoed throughout the cave, now vacated. His temples throbbed, drops of sweat ran down his cheeks and every part of his body ached as if it were broken.

Heimdall and Sif had run back from the last lap, Rekis had given the order to take off with the ship and stay in orbit for safety.

"What the hell are you still doing here?!" Exclaimed Loki, in obvious difficulty. The Guardian had joined him, watching the barrier begin to dissolve on the sides. Some of Hela's soldiers lingered limbs and weapons through the fissures.

"We will fight. With you” Hemidall replied simply, while Sif laid his hand on Loki's right arm.

"Use the teleport. Thor will need help, he can't do it alone against her. "

Loki stifled a sarcastic laugh. That was the last scenario that would come to mind until yesterday. He would have laughed at the thought of imagining himself in that cave, with his arms stretched forward, his seidr at maximum power, Sif and Heimdall ready to sacrifice themself as bait to allow him to save himself.

"As if we had a chance," he taunted her, almost in a bad way. Sif smiled bitterly.

"If I move, the barrier will collapse. And if the barrier collapses, the horde of undead will overwhelm us "he hissed, looking at the hollow and skeletal faces in front of him.

"Look for the Valkyrie. Join Thor and defeat Hela. I will try to resist and block them here: if Hela dies, her army will also cease to live - or better, to come alive, since I have the impression that these damned shit can't die, "he commented sarcastically.

"Exactly," the Guardian pointed out.

"Loki ..." the woman tightened her grip on his arm, her voice heavy, but Loki's cold glance interrupted her words immediately.

"Oh, Sif, please. I don't want your pity”.

"It's not about this. You won't last much longer, "she explained." And we won't leave you here to die. "

Loki sighed in frustration, shaking his head. He would not have had time to teleport himself: even if the two companions had intercepted the first soldiers who would have thrown themselves on them, they were too many. They would have poured like a waterfall into the cave.

"There is no other way" he whispered and those words fell into the echo of that dusty place, in the silence broken only by the panting of those hideous creatures.

Loki couldn't see it, but Heimdall was peering at him with his amber eyes for several moments. Sif, surrendered in front of Loki's words, met his gaze with a silent request for help.

"Are you sure?"

The drop of sweat on Loki's left temple ran down his cheek, moving swiftly to the edge of his jaw, close to his chin. His breathing was short, the effort unbelievable. He only looked in the direction of the Guardian, moistening his lips quickly. Then his eyes widened.

"You'll have to be fast."

"Oh ... Not in front of her".

"It’s the only way".

"Not in front of her!" Loki shouted. The barrier trembled, yielding to the left side and two creatures burst into the atrium: immediately, Sif and Heimdall, threw themselves to fight and landed them as effectively as possible.

"Not in front of me, what?" The woman exclaimed, her eyes visibly impatient and upset. Loki looked at Heimdall again, once again the concentration needed to maintain the barrier.

The Guardian read the terror in his eyes.

"So? Those monsters will stay on the ground for a few more minutes! Explain to me what you are talking about! "Sif said, pointing at them with the apex of her sword, in a dry gesture.

"I'm not leaving, Loki!" she added, when he closed himself even more in his silence and his eyes turned to the ground. His head was exploding and his concentration, would have dropped drastically and inexorably.

He was about to give up.

"You fear so much Sif’s judgment, but you didn’t fear mine, at that time" Heimdall stated, with his usual calmness in his voice. Loki grinned.

"You always knew. Nobody, apart from you and ... Odin, have ever seen me like this".

The Guardian did not answer. Sif started to speak again, but Loki shook his head, giving her a sad look.

He took a deep breath.

"I need two, three seconds to invoke the Casket of the Ancient Winters, but I'm not sure I can stop them all."

"What does the relic of Jotunheim have to do with it?" Echoed Sif, who by now had surrendered to the mysteries hidden by those two. He saw Heimdall extract the broadsword and mimed his gesture, drawing her sword and holding the shield in front of her.

Loki smiled at the limits of exasperation. A deep sense of nausea took hold of him.

"Whatever you see, Sif" replied Heimdall "Think only of stopping the race of those creatures".

"But-"

"Sif" Loki turned back "I can't take them anymore".

And Sif, faced with that desperate look and that defeated tone of voice, could do nothing but stand beside his Prince, in silence.

 

 

The rhythmic sound of footsteps echoed in the throne room: Thor looked at the woman who crossed the threshold, distractedly untangling her long black hair. Her step was measured, her cold eyes fixed on his regal figure, lying on the throne. On her throne.

Thor's lips tightened. His fingers trembled slightly around the stem of Gungnir. It would have been false to suppose that he felt no fear, but the closer her figure came to him, the more the blood of the Warriors Three lying on the floor of the Bifrost, intensified his color.

Red. His distinctive color.

 

"Sister".

Hela smiled smugly, her tone persuasive when she spoke.

"You're still alive…"

Thor smiled back. No, it wasn't easy to kill him. Neither he, nor his brother. And, apparently, all the three children - of blood or not - of Odin, were hard to die.

"I saw that you gave your personal touch to this place," he commented with visible sarcasm, a look at the fresco on the ceiling. Hela put her foot on one of the rubble, trampling them viciously, but keeping her eyes on the figure of her brother.

"It seems that Odin liked ... How can I say… To hide different things" he gestured, with her right hand.

"Or banish them".

Hela clenched her jaw, hardening her expression for a few moments, before making a slow turn on herself - her arms slightly open, indicating all that was around them.

"What do you think was Asgard, before you?" He asked. "Where do you think all this gold comes, these ornaments, these effigies?"

She looked back at him. "What do you think your people are, what do you think are the true Asgardian memories? Who do you think was Odin? You don't know anything, Thor ... You know anything about Asgard ".

Thor didn’t answer: he merely raised himself and went down a couple of steps, looking Hela in the eye - his face an imperturbable mask.

"My Father and I drowned whole civilizations in tears and blood. How do you think Asgard has come to rule all the Realms?” she continued, stepping closer to the throne.

"I ... I allowed most of this. The glory of Asgard had never been so high, until ... "and Hela gritted her teeth contemptuously "Odin didn’t decide to soften. To protect his conquests with the hypocritical claim to establish alliances and restore independence. To protect life ".

"And so, he exiled you. Yes "commented Thor "It’s a typical behavior of Our Father. And I understand, believe me, your desire for revenge. And also your claim to the throne - technically, you are the firstborn. But…"

A blue flash developed from the centre of Thor's chest and spread like a spider web to his whole body. His eye shone brightly.

"But you're a monster," he continued, while Hela squinted and ran her slender fingers over her head, turning her hair into horns.

"You killed my most faithful friends. You have slain my people. You tried to kill me and Loki ". He went down another pair of steps, releasing his power that overflowed with every passing second.

"Our Father once told me that a wise king never seeks out war ..."

Hela let herself go in a provocative grin, before throwing herself into the attack and concluding for him what she also knew well.

"But must always be ready for it!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I deliberately left part of the original dialogues and the scene of Thor and Hela, because I actually appreciated them.


End file.
